PowerBI embedded in Tier1 and Tier2 environments

What is the proper way to access the data tables for Power BI in Production, Sandbox, etc?  

If you need to connect PowerBI to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations you have several options depends on the environment that you are using.

Tier2 (PROD/UAT/TEST) or Tier1 (developer onebox)

• Tier2 environments have Azure SQL AXDW database which can be configured for automatic updates using System Administration > Entity Store > Refresh all cubes/measures. In that form you can setup update recurrence(some cubes you can update once a day, some once an hour). To access data in Tier2 you can use Direct Query. Direct Query connection to the cubes (AXDW database) is done through  Azure SQL database

Note: ODATA has access only to AXDB and does not have access to cubes, only to AXDB data.

• Tier1 environments have only SQL databases and that is real headache to configure PowerBI embedded for onebox environment. It requires external AXDW configured in Azure.