Are These Real Power BI Limitations?

[Cubist]

When Power BI is connected via DirectQuery to a SSAS model:

  1)  Do the mobile apps still work with full functionality, since the data is no longer stored in the cloud?

  2)  Is it correct all other Power BI data import sources become useless, in that Power BI won’t allow mixing of it’s modelling with a model accessed via DirectQuery? For example, it would not be possible to import data from Sales Force and add a relation to a table in the DirectQuery model?

  3)  Is it correct there is no way to use the real-time update feature of Power BI (again because of the model mixing problem)?

  4)  Is it correct the Power BI REST API becomes useless in this scenario?

Any guidance appreciated -

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@Cubist 

1) Each mobile app offers different capabilities. it appears the release of new features falls in this order. Ios, Android, Windows. Dashboards work as expected with SSAS connections, just as they would with other data sources. I believe the Tile data is cached even for SSAS datasets.

2) If you are connecting to a SSAS model in the "Direct Connect" way, then you are correct - you cannot add additional data in the desktop to a different model. You would need to add that data into the SSAS model.

3) Real Time update? When you connect to a SSAS model your dataset will always be up to data depending on how often you are refreshing your model. There is no need / or capability to schedule a refresh as it is always "live". Dashboard tiles will refresh roughly 10-15 after the dataset.

4) I don't know a ton about the API's, but if you are wanting to push data into a model, you would do that in a backend process where your model can consume that and everything would update automatically in Power BI.

Hope that answers your questions, follow up if I need to clarify anything.