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Create a Power BI connection in Unity Catalog for orchestration

This pages explains how to connect to Power BI in Unity Catalog to orchestrate publishing to Power BI with a Power BI task (preview). You must first create a connection to store your Entra credentials.

note

You must have the CREATE CONNECTION privilege in Unity Catalog to create the Power BI connection. If someone else creates the connection, you must have the USE CONNECTION privilege to use the connection in a Power BI task.

If you want to use Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service instead, see:

Step 1: Prepare your credentials​

Prepare credentials for authentication to Power BI. You can use OAuth Machine to Machine or OAuth (user to machine) authentication methods.

To prepare OAuth (Machine to Machine) credentials:

  1. Create an Azure service principal or use an existing one. To create a new Azure service principal from the Azure portal, see Register a Microsoft Entra app and create a service principal.
  2. Add the service principal to the Power BI workspace that you are publishing to.
  3. Enable the service principal in the Power BI admin portal. See Enable service principals.
  4. Generate a client secret, and save both the client ID and client secret of the principal for use in the next step.
  5. Save the authorization endpoint for use in the next step. The authorization endpoint is in the form: https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant_id}/oauth2/v2.0/authorize.

To prepare OAuth (user to machine) credentials:

  1. Get your authorization endpoint for use in the next step. The authorization endpoint is in the form: https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant_id}/oauth2/v2.0/authorize. If the Power BI workspace is in your home workspace, use common as the {tenant_id}.
  2. When creating the connection in the next step, you are prompted to login to your Microsoft account and consent to the Databricks Dataset Publishing Integration Entra App. This Entra app is provided by Databricks and used to access your Power BI workspace on your behalf to read workspace information and create and update semantic models. The specific permissions that are granted are Content.Create, Dataset.ReadWrite.All, and Workspace.Read.All.

Step 2: Create the connection​

  1. Sign in to your Databricks workspace and click Data icon. Catalog in the sidebar to open Catalog Explorer.
  2. Click External data, then Connections, and then Create a connection.
  3. On the Connections basics page of the Set up connection wizard, enter a user-friendly Connection name.
  4. Select a Connection type of Power BI.
  5. For Auth type, select OAuth Machine to Machine or OAuth (user to machine), based on the credentials you prepared previously.
  6. Click Next.
  7. In Step 2 of the Set up connection wizard, you are prompted for the credential information you prepared.
  8. Click Create connection.

This connection can now be used when configuring a Power BI task. If you would like to allow other users to access this connection, grant the USE CONNECTION privilege to those users.

Next steps​

Create a Power BI task for jobs

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