r/PowerBIdashboards

Our Power BI inventory dashboard currently depends on manually exporting data from Oracle WMS Cloud (LogFire).
We have access to the WMS application but not the underlying SQL database.
From an enterprise architecture perspective, what would be the most secure and reliable way to automate this data flow and keep the dashboard updated with minimal manual intervention?
I’d also appreciate advice on how to present and justify this requirement to our IT department while addressing security and system-performance concerns.

Hey everyone,

I have around 5 years of professional experience with Power BI and have built multiple dashboards and reporting solutions.

I'm considering offering paid online Power BI training, either 1 on 1 or in small groups.

I can either structure the sessions around topics such as DAX, Power Query, data modelling, dashboard design, KPI development, etc., or you can tell me what you want to learn and we can build the sessions around that.

If anyone is interested, feel free to DM me with your current level and what you'd like to learn.

I'm particularly interested in helping students and people trying to move into Power BI professionally.

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Hi everyone,

I’m trying to understand the best way to set up scheduled refreshes for a Power BI dashboard that I’m planning to publish/import into my organisation’s Microsoft Fabric workspace.

The dashboard gets its data from an Azure SQL Database. From what I’ve researched so far, it seems like there are a few possible approaches:

1. On-premises data gateway

2. Virtual Network (VNet) data gateway

3. Direct cloud-to-cloud connection between Power BI/Fabric and Azure SQL

I’m still fairly new to Power BI/Fabric and data infrastructure, so I’m struggling to understand when each option is actually required. Just to confirm, the data will be sitting in Azure and we dont plan to host it in Fabric. Just want to establish a connection so that we can refresh the dashboard.

My main questions are:

\- From the above options what would be the right approach?

\- Are there any good Microsoft documentation, tutorials, or walkthroughs that explain this setup from an end-to-end perspective?

I’m a trainee working mainly on the data visualisation side, so infrastructure/networking is fairly new territory for me. I’d really appreciate any practical guidance, especially from anyone who has set up Power BI/Fabric with Azure SQL in an enterprise environment.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m a BI developer from the Netherlands, so apologies for the ai generated post. I used AI to help me phrase this post more clearly.

I’m curious how other BI teams deal with report adoption and business validation.

A recent example is a supply chain KPI dashboard. The business requested it, we worked together to define the KPIs, agreed on the business definitions and thresholds, and built the dashboard.

The difficult part starts afterwards. The business users who are supposed to validate the dashboard often don’t have the time or motivation to help, so validation can take weeks or even months. Without their sign-off, it’s difficult to roll the dashboard out with confidence.

What I find frustrating is that during this period, many of those same users continue sending around the same Excel reports every week or even start building their own AI-powered dashboards and analyses. It sometimes feels like we’re building an official solution that never really gets adopted.

Is this something others experience as well?

How do you get business users engaged in validation?

How do you encourage people to use the official BI reports instead of Excel?

Have you found effective ways to increase trust and adoption?

I’d really like to hear how other organizations handle this.

The more I learn about Business Intelligence, the more I realize that dashboards aren't the hardest part.

I've spent the past few weeks reading discussions from BI professionals, data analysts, and data engineers. One thing surprised me:

Most of the frustration isn't about Power BI, Tableau, or SQL.

It's things like:
• Stakeholders not knowing what they actually need.
• Different departments using different KPI definitions.
• Spending hours cleaning messy data.
• Building dashboards that nobody ends up using.
• Being asked to export everything back to Excel.

It made me wonder if we're focusing too much on building dashboards instead of solving the real problems behind them.

So I'd love to hear from people working in BI, analytics, or data engineering:

What's the biggest pain point in your day-to-day work that you wish someone would solve?

I'm not looking for feature requests or software recommendations. I'm genuinely trying to understand the problems that consume the most time and are still poorly solved.

I'd really appreciate hearing your perspective.