Consuming Live Data Sources vs On-Premise Data via gateways

So I got this question today, on what seemed to be a little confusing for the questioner, about two features of Power BI Pro.

The question: “Why does it say ‘Consume live data sources with full interactivity’ as one feature while the other feature says ‘Access on-premise data using the Data Connectivity Gateways’, while it is obvious that if you need to connect to an on-premise data source to consume live data it has to be through a gateway?”

Okay, this is how I would explain this:

‘Consume live data sources with full interactivity’ means that you can directly access live data sources, such as relational databases, or data models built atop Analysis Services without having to load the data into Power BI first. Power BI has two ways of providing data to the user to build reports: “Import” and “Direct Query/Connect live”. The former allows you to connect to the data source, pull in the required data into Power BI and build a model off that, and then let the consumer build reports off this data model. Here the user hits Power BI for the data. The latter allows you to directly connect to the data source via Power BI and build reports off the data structure that already exists at the source, either by creating a model layer or using the model at the source. It is this latter method does this feature describe.

The other feature, ‘Access on-premises data using the Data Connectivity Gateways’ just mean that in order for you to get data from an on-premise source you need to use a Data Connectivity Gateway. The gateway is but a security mechanism that allows Power BI (which is a cloud service) to access a client’s secure environment (which is on-premise) to access data, regardless of it using the “Import” or the “Direct Query/Connect live” modes.

Of course, if you were accessing a cloud based data source such as an Azure SQL Database, an Azure SQL Data Warehouse or Excel files on a SharePoint Online folder, you would not need a gateway; and you can access them using “Import” or consume live data with full interactivity using the “Direct Query/Connect live” mode.