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, part of 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

Certified data sets and reports

If a data set or report in Power BI is certified, the corresponding Power BI Data Model and Power BI Report assets in Collibra are automatically certified, as identified by the Certified attribute. If, however, certification of a data set or report in Power BI is rescinded, the corresponding assets in Collibra still identify as being certified.

Important Collibra Data Lineage can connect only to datasets that are hosted by Power BI. It cannot connect to externally hosted datasets or models. For complete information, consult Microsoft's Power BI documentation.

Partial access to metadata of certain Power BI elements

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 app reports are only available if the name of the original report matches the name of the app report, and if the name is unique. In all other cases, the URL on the asset page links to the app, not to the app report.

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.

The Power BI API doesn't provide information about the dataset ID for Paginated Reports, therefore lineage for Paginated Reports is not available.

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.

Report attributes are not returned by the API.

When harvesting Power BI, report attributes are not returned by the API. Therefore, for a given report, Collibra Data Lineage creates a dummy report attribute. This dummy report attribute is identified in the technical lineage by an asterisk (*), as shown in the following example image. Links are drawn from all data attributes in the data set that were used to create the report, to the dummy report attribute.

The Power BI API does not return metadata from data sources that are deployed by tabular models in Power BI.

Tabular models are created in Microsoft Visual Studio with the Analysis Services projects extension. They aren't supported for metadata extraction. The API returns the reason for not getting the metadata from the dataset. It's found in the schemaRetrievalError field.

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

Warning We highly recommend that you do not move the ingested assets to other domains. If you do, the assets will be deleted and recreated in the initial Data Catalog BI domain (or domains) when you synchronize Power BI. As a result, any 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.