Power BI live connection to PostgreSQL

Question

Can someone give me some options about how I can connect a PostgreSQL database to Power BI?

Right now, I used the Power BI Desktop and drivers to connect to my local database. I then published the data to Power BI for users to access and set up a daily refresh schedule with a Personal Gateway installed. This worked fine.

My issue is that my users now want refreshes every 30 minutes instead of daily and Power BI only allows 8 refreshes per day. This seems like it would require a live connection. My only Windows machine is quite weak and I live across the world from my end-users, so my only option is to set up a remote server.

• I have an Azure Linux VM which I would prefer to use, but Power BI does not work on Linux as far as I can tell
• My ETL pipelines and database are all based on PostgreSQL and I do not want to switch over to MS SQL or the Azure database product, if I can avoid it

Should I create a Windows-based VM on Azure and install PostgreSQL there and then replicate the required tables for Power BI to visualize? What is the best set up? I did not see any option on the Power BI website to connect live to Postgres so I am a bit concerned.

Answer 1

This is an old question, so you've probably figured out a workaround, but just to confirm:

No, Power BI does not offer a live connection to PostgreSQL at the moment. You can see the current list of what Power BI does live connect to here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-data/#live-connections-and-directquery-to-on-premises-data-sources

If a live connection to PostgreSQL is important to you, I would recommend posting an idea at https://ideas.powerbi.com/ (or up-voting someone else's idea - though I don't see one right now). Microsoft does review these ideas. I'd also recommend sharing the link here, so others searching for how to do this can up-vote the same idea.

In the meantime, a couple of different workarounds:

1. Even though you can't automate refreshes as often as you'd like, you can do additional manual refreshes. You can initiate the refresh yourself, or you can suggest end-users click the refresh button to get the latest data.

2. If you don't want to manually refresh, you could look into a 3rd party tool such as Power Update (http://poweronbi.com/power-update-features/). I've never used it before, but it can refresh a Power BI Desktop file and publish it up to the service. This would have the same effect as a manual refresh, but automated.

Note: This question was also asked (and answered) here: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Integrations-with-Files-and/DirectQuery-for-PostgreSQL-Gateways-on-Linux/td-p/103418.

Answer 2

Since the august release 2019 of power BI there is now a directquery connection for postgres.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-august-2019-feature-summary/