Stefan Tsalapatis - 393 - Oct 14, 2014

We are going to use the    Power BI  to provide BI functionality through  Excel to our power users ( preferable  not from Azure, but from our on premise datasources).  I  have not dig deeply yet, so maybe my thoughts are not correct.  I think at first, instead of  SQL Views, to use  our services  as datasources. Is it possible ? (I think yes and  preferable). Using  Power Query  like in the link http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/working-with-web-services-in-power-query/  . Any experience, possible problem ? security ?   I don’t think we can use AutoQuery in the back-end ? Again maybe I don’t express well my thoughts. Power BI with Excel is indeed powerful. thanks.

I’ve no experience with PowerBI, but if they provide integration with simple REST JSON/XML services I would explore that avenue first. Likewise if they have special support for CSV or WSDL’s you can try those endpoints/formats.

Stefan Tsalapatis:

+Demis Bellot  they provide integration with JSON/XML using the new  Power Query (with M code, as in the link in my first post). One problem is that they don’t create automatically relationships between the tables , as it does with SQL Server  http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2014/09/02/create-your-own-relationships-between-tables-in-the-excel-data-model-with-power-query/  
For this reason I thought about WSDL also, but I have time to test it.