Forum Discussion
onedrive refreshWITHOUT gateway
Thank you. Yes i read it at least ten times (and the aother realted pages) and i have never been able to make refresh work (without a gateway) .
I am unclear wether my Excel files have to be in Table form so i also tried that because it automatically uses the data model i think, but it just doe not work. And so far, all my data is in EXcel, so i really don't want to go the Gateway way if not absolutely necessary.
By the way i think the sheer lenght of the documentation of Refresh etc hints at an unusual complexity for such a product:
I am working on a summary table for beginners
I think refresh is complex because data storage is complex. Power BI does a good job of pulling data from a wide range of locations, so it's not suprising to me that refreshing that data from all those (mixed) locations can be a bit tricky.
I have a simple rule of thumb for refeshing. Cloud based data (Like Azure Databases, Salesforce.com. Google Analytics etc.) refresh automatically. OneDrive and SharePoint Online are cloud based data repositories, so if I put my .PBIX or .XLSX files there they will get refreshed hourly. On premise data (Access Databases, in-house hosted SQL databases, in-house hosted Salesforce.com, or even just the files on my laptop) need a Gateway to refresh, and if it needs a Gateway, you need a Pro Licence. If I mix any of these, (Like Google Analytics and a CSV file on my C: drive) in a data model, I'll need a Gateway for Power BI to gain access to my CSV file.
Hope this helps.
Stuart
Burningsuit Your rule of thumb info is helpful. I am wondering about Cloud Based Data: if you do your modeling in Desktop - and so have imported data sets into desktop to work with and make your reports......
and then move it up to PBI Service for Dashboards
does one reset those data connections to be direct between PBI Service and Cloud Based Data - - - or must the linking always be a 2-step process of Cloud connected to Desktop and then moved up to BI Service? - - - or does one need to avoid using Desktop altogether??
CahabaData, would that it were that simple. You'll need to use Desktop (or excel) to create a Data model. This may contain data from Cloud-based and on-premise files. That then is published to Power BI service. If you've only used Cloud based data, refresh is (relatively) easy and won't need a gateway. If you've used any on-premise data you'll need a gateway to refresh that data.
However if you connect to data through Get Data in power BI service, and choose a Service, that will connect to the cloud-based service and set up the data model for you along with the refresh. So you don't need desktop here.
I guess that if you only ever want to access cloud based data as provided in Services, you can do without Power BI desktop, but if you want to access on-premise data, you'll need to use Desktop.
Stuart
One more related question: Do you feel BI Service can model the Cloud Based Data as robustly as Desktop? Maybe that question is too open ended and relative - let's try it again:
Right now I don't think of the need to use Desktop as being due to the type data source but rather due to a need for more elaborate data modeling (Query Editory) regardless of the data source. Or to say this another way - that Service doesn't offer as comprehensive modeling. Is that much true?
So IF it a Cloud Based Data source and IF one must use Desktop to get the modeling right in order to produce the Visualizations - then it still is a little unclear to me once you move the PBI Report up to Service - - how does that refresh get automated.....
Many thanks.
This is my understanding too.
However I have not been able to make it work (ie Refresh a Pbix getting data from Excel files on OneDrive for business and published to the Service) despite days of effort.One thing i do not understand: my data source on the Pbix desktop is mentionning my files as "C: etc" . How would that data source once in the Service would know that it is a OneDrive file?
Also : do i by chance need to have an azure account for this to work?
At this stage i am stuck because i have still not been able to uninstall the gateway and re test from scratch.
