Getting data from SharePoint Online List vs OData Feed

[mihaela]

Hello!

We have two ways to get data from a Sharepoint List (OData Feed and SharePoint Online List) - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/40040.power-bi-two-way-to-get-data-from-....

Can anyone help on what is the difference between the two ones? When we should choose one over another?

Any comments would be highly appreciated 🙂

[76Special]

I'm also posting in this old thread because Google made it the top result for related web searches.

I found that using the ODATA connector was the only way to enable the scheduled refresh from a Sharepoint online List. There may be other ways if i was an admin, but I'm not and as far as I can tell the Sharepoint Online List connector doesn't support scheduled refresh.
This was helpful: Data refresh in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

[otravers]

I'm posting in this old thread because Google made it the top result for related web searches. The main difference between the two is that using the OData feed is supposed to support query folding according to the documentation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/power-query-folding

I'm trying to clarify how to check whether that actually works in Power BI Desktop, as the View Native Query option is greyed out right from the Source step (i.e. without doing any transformation that might break query folding).

[v-yuezhe-msft · Accepted solution]

@mihaela，

There is no obvious difference when you use the two connectors to connect to SharePoint online data source, you can find that in the Navigator of Power BI Desktop, two connectors bring almost same tables, but the table structure can be  different. If you want to connect to a specific online list, you can use  the OData URL: https://yoursharepointsite/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/ListName. 

Regards,
Lydia

[Anonymous]

But what about performance?

Would it be better to filter using OData than importing all data from SharePoint.Tables ?

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous, Did you manage to figure out any variations on performances using either of the two connectors?

Would love to hear yur thoughts 🙂

cheers

Chris

[leigh_yh]

I'm also interested in reasons why one would choose to connect using odata vs. the SharePoint list link.