Powerbi databricks connector should import column description

[Erik]

I posted this idea in ideas.powerbi.com as well, but it is quite unclear to me whether the powerbi databricks connector is in fact made by MS or Databricks, so I post it here as well!

It is possible to add comments/descriptions to databricks database columns, and in PowerBi a column can have a column description which can pop up when hovering over the column name. When importing a table from databricks using the powerbi databricks connector, it would be nice if it imported the column got the description from the corresponding column in databricks!

[Erik]

Hey @Kaniz Fatma​ , it would be cool to at least know if I should adress these ideas to databricks or microsoft.

[Atanu · Accepted solution]

@Erik Parmann​  the connector is the colab product of MS and Databricks. But I feel this is a nice feature to add. I request to raise a feature request with us from here - https://ideas.databricks.com/ . Our product team definitely will take a look at this for future development . Thanks.

[Erik]

@Atanu Sarkar​ We use databricks on Azure, is https://ideas.databricks.com/ supposed to work for us? Because I only get the message "Error trying to handle that request" when I try to add our azure databricks workspace url.

If it is AWS only, where do we Azure user channel our ideas?

[Atanu]

@Erik Parmann​  you can do it from help icon -> feedback option of your workspace . Like below -

[Erik]

Ok, that sends me to "https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/forum/2efba7dc-ef24-ec11-b6e6-000d3a4f0da0", is that where you want it? Given the lack of feedback there it seemed a bit... dead to me. But alright, I gave it a try and made an issue 🙂

I also had the brilliant idea that table descriptions should show up when you import the table, feel free to vote for that as well 🙂

[capstone]

You can use this C# script in Tabular Editor to achieve this. Basically, all the comments can be accessed via the 'information_schema' in Databricks. Import the relevant columns from the schema using this query 

select * from samples.information_schema.columns

You will only need the tablename, columnname, comment columns (you will need a mapping table to map the view name from databricks to the table name in Power BI).

This is a once off step. Then just run the below script and you're done !