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
