Personal access token retention period change

[Brianben]

Hi all,

Recently we recognized that the maximun retention period of personal access token has changed to 730days from never. From official document, I didn't find the effective date of this changes, do someone know about it?

Besides, we have some PowerBI report that connect to databricks using the access token as authentication method. Since we can no longer set the retention period to never, we need to change the access token once it expired. Is that means if I have 100 PowerBI report published on PowerBI service, I have to make total 100 changes for all report?

Hope someone could help me out with these question, thanks in advance.

[Alberto_Umana · Accepted solution]

Hi @Brianben,

This change only affects new tokens created after the change and does not impact existing tokens that were created with an indefinite expiration. The effective date of this change was noted in the release notes for December 2024. Was the PAT token created before that?

It is not possible to set the lifespan of a PAT token to never. The maximum token lifetime for new tokens is 730 days. This change was implemented for security reasons and applies to all new tokens created after the change

[Brianben]

@Alberto_Umana Thank you for the reply, we need to generate new token recently, that's why I recongize the changes. 

Do you have any ideas on my another question with PowerBI connection in the same post? Thanks.

[Sidhant07]

Hi @Brianben ,

The maximum retention period for personal access tokens (PATs) in Databricks has indeed changed to 730 days (two years). Unfortunately, the exact effective date of this change is not specified in the official documentation available.

Regarding your Power BI reports that use access tokens for authentication, you are correct that you will need to update the access tokens once they expire. If you have 100 Power BI reports published on Power BI Service, you will need to update the access token for each report individually when the current tokens expire. This means making 100 changes for all reports.

To mitigate this, you might consider using OAuth tokens instead of PATs, as they offer greater security and convenience. Databricks recommends using OAuth access tokens, which can be managed more efficiently and securely. This could potentially reduce the administrative overhead associated with managing multiple PATs.

For more detailed guidance on managing and rotating tokens, you can refer to the Databricks documentation on personal access tokens and OAuth authentication.