Power BI ingestion limitations

There are a few considerations and limitations that you must take into account when you use the Power BI metadata connector and lineage feature.

Supported subscriptions

Your subscription determines which Power BI metadata the lineage harvester can collect. You need one of the following subscriptions to ingest Power BI metadata in Data Catalog:

  • Power BI Pro. To ensure a full ingestion, you also need a Power BI Embedded Capacity subscription in Microsoft Azure.
  • Power BI Premium.
  • Power BI Premium Per User.

Other Power BI subscriptions are currently not supported.

Power BI metadata

The lineage harvester can only partially access metadata of the following Power BI elements:

  • Classic Power BI workspaces, which include My Workspace. Only a full ingestion of new Power BI workspaces is supported.
  • Power BI workspaces that are not part of a dedicated capacity.
  • Descriptions of most Power BI elements.
  • Power BI apps. They can be ingested as Power BI Reports, but there is no easy way to distinguish them from real Power BI reports.

The lineage harvester cannot access metadata of the following Power BI elements:

  • Tile subtitles.
  • Data from external sources supplying the input for the Power Query expressions in Power BI.

Important The Collibra Data Lineage server can process most, but not all, complex Power BI metadata. This means that the success rate of a Power BI ingestion can be very high, but almost never 100%.

Known issues

The following table presents the known issues of the Power BI integration in Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud.

Known issue

Description

The data set Report Usage Metrics Model cannot be ingested.

The Report Usage Metrics Model is a data set that is automatically created by Power BI. This data set does not contain actual data, which means that they contain nothing to ingest into Data Catalog.

However, the lineage harvester still tries to access the metadata and, since there is nothing to access, shows an error message. All error messages about the Report Usage Metrics can be ignored.

Stitching results are gray.

Usually, data objects that Collibra Data Lineage stitches to assets in Data Catalog have a yellow background in the technical lineage graph. However, assets of BI sources, for example Power BI, that are stitched to other assets in Data Catalog currently have a gray background. This does not indicate that stitching failed. You can see which assets are stitched on the Stitching tab page.

Power BI assets that are moved to a different domain are deleted after synchronization.

Warning When you run the lineage harvester, Collibra Data Lineage creates all Power BI assets in the Data Catalog BI domain (or domains) you specified in the lineage harvester configuration file. We highly recommend that you do not move these assets to other domains. If you move assets to other domains, they will be deleted and recreated in the initial Data Catalog BI domains when you synchronize Power BI. As a result, all manually added characteristics of those assets are lost.

You have successfully ingested Power BI metadata, but calculated columns are not shown in the Technical lineage or in the browse tab pane.

Calculated columns are virtually the same as a non-calculated columns, with one exception: their values are calculated using DAX formulas and values from other columns. Collibra Data Lineage currently does not support internal transformations via DAX language, and any data objects derived via DAX are not shown in the technical lineage or in the browse tab pane. Currently, only M Query/Power Query expressions are supported.