We are just starting to offer data self-service to our users. In our work environment we have three different groups of servers - production, development, and reporting. When a user asks to start working with Power BI to determine what types of reporting they want to create, we place a copy of their production databases on our development server and point them to it. Once they figure out what they want and which tables are needed, we set up nightly ETL jobs to copy just those items from the production server to a large PBI Users database on the reporting server. As we perform the copy, we also rename the tables to add a prefix for the user's department (the content and column names within each table remain the same). For example, source table Table1 in database DB1 for a user in Sales would be copied to database PBI Users in the report server and renamed Sales_Table1. We don't want to have to keep up with separate databases for every Power BI user, hence the prefix.
Ideally, all we should need to do is tell the user to change the connection information in the .pbix file to use the new database and table names and location on the reporting server and they're ready to go. We can change the database name and location just fine, but we cannot find any mechanism for changing the table names other than directly editing the M script for each query in the Query Editor. Is there any other way to do this without having to dig into the script each time? Seems like it would be a useful feature to have.
