What is a Power BI Gateway, when do you really need a Power BI Gateway? How do you use it?
And is it possible to avoid using one? All
excellent questions, my friend and we would try to answer them all in this video.
But before we go any further, I have a hot tip to share with you.
There's some confusion around this folks
You do not need a paid Power BI license to use Power BI
Gateway we need a license if you're sharing a report with others, but if you're just using for yourself and you want to
try out Power BI Gateway to refresh your own reports in your workspace. You can use it with the free license.
Now, of course that is true as of recording this video Microsoft, I'm sure retains the right to change the licensing scheme
but as of now you do not need a Power BI license to use Power BI Gateway, which is good news,
Now this video is part of a series on Power BI Gateways once the next videos are available
we would link to them up in the corner and down in the description.
So make sure to watch them all and if you are just getting started
Or you keep getting stuck in Power BI then make sure to check out our complete step-by-step
Power BI Tutorial as well. Let's dive into Power BI Gateways.
My name is Avi Singh I'm Microsoft MVP and best-selling Power BI author
and if you want to become a Power BI Pro, make sure to subscribe and click that bell
so you are notified whenever I go live to answer your Power BI questions.
Now out of the 4 questions that we're trying to answer let's stack all these two together
So what is a power bi gateway? And when do I need it? We'll come back and cover the other two
Let me give you a quick definition first
Once you publish your barbier models from power bi desktop to power bi dot-com
It becomes a challenge to refresh them if you are using
on-premise data sources and
That is where the power bi gateway comes in steps in. It makes that possible by acting as a bridge connecting
Barbier comm to your
On-premise data sources. Now, here's how to piccoli the story goes now
you perhaps or somebody in your company starts off just playing around with power bi desktop it downloaded and they start working with it and
They use the get data feature, which is pretty much the first thing you do in power bi
and
So they use get data and they use that to connect to quite a few possibly
On-premise data sources, and these could be files. These could be folders. They're connected
ooh, this could be local sequel servers or really any other data source, which is local or on your internal network and
Everything works great
they have connected the power bi desktop to these local on-premise data sources build that model maybe build a dashboard and
they can refresh it as
Many times as they want on their desktop is just open the power bi desktop hit refresh and everything works
So everything works so far?
But then they take the next step
most likely because they want to share the report or they just want to check out the functionality on power bi comm and
Then they go ahead and publish it to power bi comm and that's when things stop working now
When they publish it bar viacom the report itself works
but then most likely they either try out one of these options they either
Find out this option to refresh the report so they invoke that in in the data set and they get this error
refresh fail due to Gateway configuration issues, or they maybe try out clicking the other button scheduled refresh and
There they find out that scheduled refresh is kind of grayed out, which is also because you need a part of that gateway
So if you or one of the users in your company have hit this raw
Then guess what? Well, you need a power bi gateway, so we'll talk about that. And what about a waiting one?
We'll come back and talk about that. Later
So again, well partly a gateway is gonna do is this is gonna let power bi com
so again
The challenge is how does power bi comm connect to or talk to your on-premise data sources when it's trying to do refresh
That's a challenge and that
Is what you are going to solve by installing this gateway the power bi way on
One of the machines inside the network could be a local computer could be a server could be a different machine
So let's talk about that. It's like, how do I use it? How do you how do you configure it?
And how do you set it up? Well, you can do that in three
Simple steps one you download the power bi gateway second. You install it in the power bi gateway. There are two modes
We'll talk about that and last step is to configure the Barbie I get winged. Let's talk about download. That one is really easy
If you know where to look so it's easily located inside your power bi portal itself
So just log in to power bi comm and then click on this icon right there
And once you do that, it's gonna give you a drop-down and from there
Just select the data gate great option and that'll take you to a page from where you can download the latest
edition of power bi gateway
Let's move on to step two which is to install the power bi gateway
Now when you launch the installer, it's gonna right away give you these two options
All right. So the first one is saying on-premise data gateway
Recommended I'm gonna call that the enterprise mode and the other one says on-premise data gateway
Personal mode and I'll just refer to that as personal mode. So there are these two
Options we should have to choose right away. Do you want to install it in enterprise mode or
Personal mode let's talk about these two. So this comes from the Microsoft website and this compares the two options
Let's talk about the personal mode for us. Now again, if you are
Evaluating power bi or just try it out for yourself
Then personal mode is the way to go even though some of the Microsoft
Documentation and of course you saw the install screen it says oh, you know the other one is recommended. That's okay
but again, if you're just evaluating power bi just using for yourself and this is
Probably the right option for you
Now one advantage for this is that you can install this even if you're not an administrator on the computer
So some companies have these permissions lock down. You may not be an administrator even on your own machine
so if you just but this option personal mode would still work, right and
You know, so this one runs with your credentials and it definitely can import data and set up scale to refresh
So this would work but this would work pretty much for you. So let's talk about the other option, which is the enterprise mode
So for that one well
This one is typically set up by IT or maintained by IT but not necessarily
so maybe you are you you know your team of I don't know 10 or 20 finance people and one of you sets up this
Power bi gateway in the enterprise mode so that all every member in the finance team can access
This gate one can use this gateway to refresh their model, right?
So so again can be IT or can be a business user
But the main idea is that this can serve multiple users multiple users can use this gateway?
To help with refreshing the model and it definitely can do that
It also has some additional bells and whistles for direct query support and support for live connection to analysis services
so
That's it. That's for the install step now for the configure step
We would cover the configuration steps in our upcoming
Videos in a lot of detail and we'll link them here so you can watch them all and get step-by-step
instructions on how to set up the power be a gateway in personal mode or
Enterprise mode they are quite a bit different. Alright, so for this video I wanted to talk about the last question
We were trying to answer which is you know
Can you avoid using a bar be having to use a power bi gateway now?
First of all, what would be the reasons that you want to avoid?
Well, maybe you feel it's gonna be a hassle or maybe you're not quite ready for you for it yet
I mean you do want the Refresh but you know, you're just evaluating power bi and this sounds too serious and like, you know
What I'll deal with it later or it's quite possible that you are just keep
Running into errors using the Gateway. And again, it's my other videos are going to help you with that
But still it's possible that you're in this scenario, or maybe there could be other scenarios as well. So
Maybe you have one of these reasons for that
So I'm just going to share with you the tips that I know of
what you can use to avoid having to use a power bi gateway your first option is you avoid using
Local or on-premise data sources and instead use cloud only sources
So if you're connecting to kind of sharepoint online or a web data sources and so forth
Then you do not need a gateway. You do not need a gateway
Now, of course a lot of times you do not have a choice
But I'm just gonna call it just share one example with you where people often have this choice when they're working with onedrive
or SharePoint Online
Files or folders. Now what I've seen people do is that they go into
There they are using onedrive and SharePoint folders or something
but they have those synced to their own desktop machine and what they do is they connect to that file Aleph or
that folder by pointing to
Their local copy, right? So they would say oh I want to connect to this excel file
they would navigate inside there, you know kind of computer Windows Explorer and select that file and
what that's gonna end up and the
What's gonna end up happening is that and the file path would be?
Hard-coded to a local path on your machine. All right. So again the file exists in the cloud, but the way you
Connected to the file you ended up make you know power bi as far as power bi concerned
It's a local file. Now, of course, you can easily change that by
Using the web option and then connecting to the file using the URL and now power bi is gonna understand that
Oh, this is not a local file
This is a web file and given the right credentials which you will provide power bi I can access it without
Needing a gateway, right? So again in some cases you can kind of switch this and have this option
so just keep that in mind and
if you are curious about
Finding out more about how you can connect power bi to sharepoint files and sharepoint folders and SharePoint lists
I have a complete video for you my friends. So again, it's linked up in the corner and down in the description as well
So that was option one to avoid local on-premise data sources and use
Cloud sources exclusively in that case. You don't need gateway to do the Refresh
let's talk about option two which is
So cool. You do not refresh in cloud, right? So I mean as long as you publish the file it phile still works
So if you choose not to refresh in the cloud you then have two options
All right
So 2a is you just refresh manually and publish it to power bi com so I know this well
It may work in some scenarios
Maybe the file doesn't need frequent refresher or maybe again, you're just testing things out right so you can always just open power bi desktop
Hit the refresh button. Manually. It's gonna it's gonna work on your computer with your credentials
You know inside the network no power bi gateway needed and then once the Refresh is done
you just hit the publish button again and republish it to power bi com now, of course if that's
That doesn't sound too appealing then you can also look into
Third-party tools which can schedule a local refresh on your computer. So the Refresh doesn't work on the cloud
It works locally on your computer and thus does not need a power bi gateway
And then they can automatically publish to power bi com one such tool is power update
But I'm sure there others there as well
Hopefully I was able to answer all for these questions for you at this point and make sure to check out our other videos on
Barbie eye gateway and
also check out our
60-minute power bi tutorial link there as well. I'll see you next time until then power on
Hey keep watching more videos and keep learning power bi but if you did enjoy this video
I would love to hear from you. So leave a comment like subscribe
All the good stuff while we're on my friends