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Microsoft Power BI Connections

Power BI is a powerful tool for managing reports and creating dashboards. It includes built-in data preparation capabilities, making seamlessly managing your reports and dashboards easy.

The Alteryx Analytics Cloud (AAC) Power BI connector allows you to publish data directly into your Power BI datasets.

Key Functionalities

The connector offers two primary functionalities:

  • Publish to Power BI datasets

  • Create a new dataset

Publish

The connector lets you publish data to a table within an existing Power BI dataset. The supported publishing modes are:

  1. Append

    • Adds new rows to the existing table.

    • May fail if incoming data columns are incompatible with existing columns.

  2. Overwrite (keep existing columns)

    • Replaces all existing rows while keeping the columns intact.

    • May fail if incoming data columns are incompatible with existing columns.

  3. Overwrite (update columns)

    • Replaces all existing data, including columns and schema.

    • Best used when writing data to a freshly created dataset’s tables.

Create a New Dataset

  • Create new datasets directly from the Output tool, along with tables.

  • You cannot define the schema/columns for the tables during creation.

  • Ensure you have selected the Workspace as part of the browsing experience in the Output Tool.

Important Tips

  • Only one table per Output Tool.

  • For a new dataset, always use “Overwrite (update columns)” for the first publish.

Note

Creating a new dataset and publishing data are separate actions. After creating a new dataset, it will not be automatically selected for publishing.

Create Power BI Connection

Use OAuth 2.0 authentication to access Power BI. Note that OAuth 2.0 authentication requires additional configuration. Go to OAuth 2.0 for Microsoft Power BI

The following instructions will guide you through Power BI connection creation.

  1. Navigate to the Connections page.

  2. Select Create Connection and search for Power BI.

  3. Select the Power BI card.

  4. Once the connection configuration form opens up, name the connection.

  5. Choose your OAuth client from the OAuth Client dropdown.

  6. Select Authenticate. You will be led through a regular OAuth 2.0 flow of authenticating against your Power BI tenant app.

  7. Once the authentication is successful, save your connection and start using it in workflows.

Using Power BI in Designer Cloud

To set the configuration for PowerBI in a workflow,

  1. Drop an Output Tool onto the canvas.

  2. Select the Power BI connection and let it load the browsing experience for finding Power BI Datasets.

  3. Locate the correct workspace as applicable and select it.

  4. If you want to create a New Dataset, select + New Dataset on any workspace. On the modal that pops up, add a name for the Power BI Dataset, ensure you follow any naming standards that are defined across your organization.

    Start adding tables. You have to add at least 1 and up to 75 tables. Select Save . You should now be able to see the newly created dataset in the workspace (use the search bar to find it).

  5. Find the appropriate dataset under the workspace.

  6. Select a table under the dataset to write into. You can only add 1 table per Output Tool.

  7. Select the write/publish option:

    Append,

    Overwrite (keep existing columns),

    or Overwrite (update columns).

  8. Select Continue.

Known Limitations

  • All known limitations under Microsoft’s official take around push datasets - become core limiting factors for features on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/push-datasets-limitations

  • If any of the following scenarios are encountered - there is a high chance that your publish action to Power BI Dataset would fail:

    • If over 1,000,000 rows were added within a span of ONE HOUR against a specific Power BI dataset. This holds even if someone else on your team exhausted the limit (or brought it too close to the limit).

    • Over 5 concurrent publish actions have been attempted on a Power BI dataset.

    • Over 120 publish actions were attempted on the same Power BI dataset within the span of a minute.

    • If a table has 250,000 or more rows, and over 120 publish actions have been attempted within an hour for the same Power BI dataset.

    • If the value of a 'string' cell exceeds 4,000 characters in any given publish action against a Power BI table.

  • If a dataset was freshly created, either on the Power BI Cloud tenant or using the “Create Dataset” action in the Power BI connection in the Output Tool on AACP, a publish action must always use the “Overwrite (update columns)” as the publish setting for the first time run,

    • the connector creates new tables with a dummy column (owing to some Power BI API limitations).

    • therefore, it’s imperative that you use ‘update columns’ as the publish option when writing to the table for the first time.

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