Power BI ingestion considerations and limitations

There are a few considerations and limitations that you should be aware of when you use the Power BI metadata connector and lineage feature.

General considerations

  • Ensure that the lineage harvester can connect to the following URLs:
    • https://login.microsoftonline.com:443
    • https://api.powerbi.com:443
    • The URL of your Power BI tenant, which you have to specify in the tenantDomain property of your lineage harvester configuration file.
  • The assets created in Collibra have the same names as their counterparts in Power BI. Full names and Display names cannot be changed in Data Catalog.
  • Asset types are only created if you have all specific Power BI and Data Catalog permissions.
  • The Power BI assets are created in the domain (or domains) that you specify in the Power BI <source ID> configuration file.
  • Relations that were created between Power BI assets and other assets via a relation type in the Power BI operating model, are deleted upon synchronization. The same is true of any attribute types in the operating model that you add to Power BI assets. To ensure that the characteristics you add to Power BI assets are not deleted upon synchronization, be sure to use characteristics that are not part of the Power BI operating model.

Supported subscriptions

You need one of the following subscriptions to ingest Power BI metadata in Data Catalog. The metadata collected by the lineage harvester is the same, regardless of your subscription.

  • Power BI Pro.
  • 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.
  • Descriptions of most Power BI elements.
  • Power BI apps are not ingested. They can, however, be ingested as Power BI Reports.
    Note The prefix "[App]" in the name of a Power BI Report asset indicates that the report is distributed as part of an app, in Power BI. Direct links to such reports in Power BI don’t work, therefore Power BI Report asset pages for such reports do not include the URL attribute.

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.

Power BI datamarts are currently not supported.

Important The Collibra Data Lineage service 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.

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 Power BI <source ID> 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 tables and 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.

You get an error message that mentions one of the following:

  • “… function not implemented”
  • “invalid lexical element”

This means that the specific integration feature is not currently supported.

Tip You can add your ideas for product enhancements and new features in the Collibra Integrations Ideation Portal.