Updated Export Settings

A Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I’m thankful for your interest in and support of my work.

I’m glad that Microsoft has recently updated the Power BI tenant export settings and thus mitigated the the complaints I had in my “A False Sense of Data Security” blog. Disabling the “Export to …” settings, which now applies also to paginated reports, no longer disables live connections to published datasets and features that depend on it, such as connecting to published datasets in Power BI Desktop, accessing the Power BI Premium XMLA endpoint, and Analyze in Excel. Instead, there is a clear distinction and  now there two separate settings that affect external connectivity (for XMLA connectivity, the XMLA Endpoint capacity setting must be enabled in Read-Only or Read-Write modes):

• Allow live connections – This is a catch-all setting for allowing the live connectivity features.
• Allow XMLA endpoints and Analyze in Excel with on-premises datasets — Microsoft felt that there should be a separate setting (besides “Allow live connections”) for connecting to on-prem datasets. However, just like disabling “Allow live connections”, this setting also effectively disables the Power BI Premium XMLA endpoint preventing other tools, such as Visual Studio or SSMS, to connect to published datasets.