One week ago I delivered a session for 24 hour of PASS, the online free event delivered by PASS (recordings are now available), where I introduced my one-day preconference Create a Power BI Solution in one day that I will deliver at PASS Summit 2016 in Seattle on October 25, 2016.

As usual, there were too many questions and not enough time, so I include in this blog post the Q&A that I was not able to answer online. I hope it will be helpful.

  • Can you give us some information about the best way to govern security for accessing reports?
    • This is a long topic that you can understand better by reading the free eBook Introducing Microsoft Power BI.
    • In short, you can share a dashboard from your personal workspace (you can invite people from outside your organization in this case), or you can create a group workspace within your organization so that all the members access to all documents without requiring single authorization for each dashboard. You also have organizational content packs as a way to deliver shared content within an organization.When we can get a solution of BI like Power BI without to have publish my data on the cloud?
  • Do your company’s network administrators have to open ports in order for the gateway to work?
    • The Data Gateway is like a client connecting to web services through ports 80/443, plus a few other outbound ports that have to be opened. You can find a detail here in section Ports.
  • Can PowerBI connect to an on-premise SQL Server OLTP database or only to an Analysis Services database?
    • You can do both. The connection with SQL Server could be in Import or DirectQuery mode, the one with Analysis Services could be in Import or Live mode. Fundamentally, Import creates a copy of data on Power BI service that you can refresh, and data are available even if your gateway is not accessible. Using DirectQuery / Live connections, data are not stored in Power BI service, but your on-premise server must we available at query time.
  • When using the Data Gateway with a windows user where does the AD that authenticates that user can reside?
    • The data gateway connects to Analysis Services using an administrator, and it can impersonate an user using the EffectiveUserName property in the connection string.
    • I suggest you reading the Power BI Security article written by Adam Saxton.
  • Any thoughts about the row-level security introduced in the July release of Power BI versus the use of row-level security in SSAS?
    • The row-level security is fundamentally the same feature you have in Analysis Services, just exposed through Power BI.