Forum Discussion
onedrive refreshWITHOUT gateway
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
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.