I'm an experienced developer who knows very little about Power BI. So we've hired some consultants to implement our Power BI screens. And I provided them with a read-only login to my SQL Server database.
It works okay, but when we complained that the data never updates, they are now telling us we should set up a VM to "assure that at the refreshing moment, the scheduled job is not going to fail. VM is always connected, so even during holidays, weekends, the data will be always refreshing."
They followed up with "If the database is on-premise, we need a gateway to connect power bi to the database. If the machine, where the gateway is installed is off, power bi can not connect to the database. So, we need a VM to assure that the gateway is always on."
But this makes zero sense to me. Our database is not on-premise if it's on the Internet and we've given them a connection string. They should be able to update the data at any time.
Can anyone tell me what I'm missing here? I'm starting to question these guys' knowledge. Is it this complicated for Power BI to automatically update its data?
Some data sources require a Data Gateway, even if you put them on the open internet. Data sources that are typically deployed on private networks, or data sources that require 3rd party drivers require the Power BI On-Prem Gateway for refresh. See the list here.