Power BI with Databricks
Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics service that provides interactive visualizations with self-service business intelligence capabilities. When you integrate Power BI with Databricks, you bring scalable data processing and high-performance analytics to all business users, enabling them to create rich reports and dashboards without depending on IT staff or database administrators.
The integration allows you to publish data sets directly from Databricks, connect Power BI Desktop to your Databricks clusters and Databricks SQL warehouses, and configure secure authentication methods for enterprise deployments.
For guidance on how to best set up your dashboards and data, see Power BI cheat sheet.
Connect to Power BI
There are multiple ways to connect to Databricks from Power BI.
Power BI platform | Description |
|---|---|
Connect Power BI Desktop to Databricks clusters and SQL warehouses using Partner Connect or manual configuration. | |
Publish data from Databricks to the Power BI service. |
If you want to use a Power BI task to orchestrate your Power BI semantic models automatically, you must create a Power BI connection in Unity Catalog first.
If you have Assume permission on a role, you can authorize your OAuth connection as that role. Power BI then runs all queries as the role. See Third-party BI tools.
Additional connection setup options
There are additional setup options when connecting to Databricks from Power BI.
Microsoft has removed the Metric View BI Compatibility Mode option from the Databricks connector for Power BI. This connector option allowed Power BI to query Unity Catalog metric views, and reports that use it no longer function.
To query metric views from Power BI, use the connector's Native query option with the MEASURE() function in DirectQuery mode. See Native SQL queries and Use metric views with external BI tools. You can also use Databricks AI/BI dashboards, which work natively with metric views.
To request restored support for Databricks metric views in the Power BI connector, vote and provide feedback on the Fabric Ideas community post.
Setup option | Description |
|---|---|
Set up a service principal for machine-to-machine (M2M) OAuth before connecting to Databricks from Power BI. | |
Switch from the ODBC driver to the Arrow Database Connectivity (ADBC) driver when connecting to Databricks from Power BI. | |
Configure Microsoft Entra ID as the identity provider for SSO to Databricks from Power BI. | |
Enable BI compatibility mode to query Unity Catalog metric views from BI tools that can't pass custom SQL to Databricks. |