Forum Discussion
when are gateways necessary?
The gateway allows access to data that in on-premise, and which Power BI Service cannot access from outside your network. The gateway will connect internallly to the data sources, update the data and send it to Power BI Service.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-onprem
Is it safe to say that a gateway is only required for on-prem sources (i.e., not cloud)? That is, it has nothing to do with the connection mode being import or DirectQuery?
The way I understand it, yes.
That implies that putting Power BI on top of ServiceNow (i.e., a cloud source) via ODBC in import mode (by default, as ODBC doesn't support DirectQuery) would not require a gateway for refreshes. However, I am being told by my peers that a gateway is required for refreshes in this scenario. (Unfortunately, currently, I don't have access to this ODBC driver. So, I can't test this.) Are they wrong?