New version of Power BI Report Server enables scheduled data refresh, Direct Query, new REST API

Microsoft has announced the release of a new version of its Power BI Report Server. As Microsoft Senior Program Manager Christopher Finlan described on the Microsoft Power BI blog, the release includes all of the features Microsoft introduced in the August 2017 Preview, plus several new features customers have demanded, including:

• scheduled data refresh
• Direct Query
• a new REST API for developers.

This update to the June 2017 release is supported for production workloads, so advises Finlan "you should feel free to upgrade your production environment to take advantage of all of these new capabilities."

Finlan provides a link to download Power BI Report Server.

Scheduled data refresh for Power BI reports

The August 2017 Preview of Power BI Report Server introduced the capability to upload Power BI reports without an external connection to SQL Server Analysis Services. This of course disallowed refreshing the data feeding that report.

Users can now set data refresh schedules for Power BI reports using any of over two dozen data sources. These sources include SQL Server, Oracle, Excel Workbooks, SAP HANA, and more. Users can set multiple refresh schedules for each report, which enables even greater control around how often you update your data.

Finally, Microsoft has increased the size of the files that users may upload to the server and schedule data refreshes to 2 GB.

Direct Query support

For reports that require live source data, Microsoft has enabled Direct Query for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Oracle, Teradata, SAP HANA and SAP BW. Users need ...