Power BI live connection to PostgreSQL

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.

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/

For any future viewers of this question - I'm working on building and maintaining a custom connector for exactly this purpose. So far I've been able to access most features except those which require datetime adds or diffs. We do have this working in our production environment w/ Postgres 11 via an enterprise gateway.

Repo:https://github.com/sgoley/DirectQuery-for-ODBC-in-PowerBI

Please feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to help me resolve any outstanding bugs remaining or just learn more.

A how-to is available at medium here:https://medium.com/just-readr-the-instructions/directquery-with-postgres-from-powerbi-desktop-f3d8c4dc5e15

Edit: As of August 2019 release, PowerBI will be supporting Direct Query in the native PostgreSQL connector:https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-august-2019-feature-summary/#postgresql