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Decoupling power bi reports from schemas

IONA
New Contributor III

Hi

I'm sure many of you have power bi reports that use the native Databricks connector to pull data from a schema to fuel a wonderful dashboard. If the source schemes was moved to a different catalog or a table renamed then the pbi connection would be broken and would have to be repaired by going into the advanced editor and changing the source from where the pbi pulls from.

If you have one or two pbi reports this is none to troubling. If however throughout you organization you have many this can be quite a task.

Is there a recognized way, or does anyone have a good idea, how one might "de-couple" a pbi report from the core schema and have it point first to a buffer which in turn point to the catalogs. The pbi knows no different, it will always point to the buffer that it was build from. Any repointing can be done on the Databricks side in some configuration.

My initial thoughts were along these lines. To select from a Databricks view, a view that could be dropped and programmatically and recreated pointing to the switched catalog. Such a script could be run manually in Databricks or fired at its api from a release pipeline if different environments dev/qa/prd were in play.

Gary

Any thoughts? Recommendations

1 REPLY 1

szymon_dybczak
Esteemed Contributor III

Hi @IONA ,

You can parametrize your data source using power query parameters. Just define parameter for catalog, schema etc. 

I have such setup in one of the project. We parametrized our PBI semantic models and when we are deploying semantic model to a higher environment we are using parameters to automate entire process (using pbi deployment pipelines)

You can check following article for reference: 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/power-query-query-parameters

https://www.rigordatasolutions.com/post/swap-data-sources-dynamically-using-parameters-in-power-bi

Hi @IONA ,

You can parametrize your data source using power query parameters. Just define parameter for catalog, schema etc. 

I have such setup in one of the project. We parametrized our PBI semantic models and when we are deploying semantic model to a higher environment we are using parameters to automate entire process (using pbi deployment pipelines)

You can check following article for reference: 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/power-query-query-parameters

https://www.rigordatasolutions.com/post/swap-data-sources-dynamically-using-parameters-in-power-bi

In your case you can decouple power bi reports from schema in exactly the same way - using parameters.

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