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.

In this topic

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 If, however, certification of a data set or report in Power BI is rescinded, the corresponding assets in Collibra are still identifed as being certified.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.
  • Power BI apps are not ingested; however Power BI reports distributed as part of an app in Power BI are ingested.
    Note The prefix "[App]" in the name of a Power BI Report asset indicates that the report is distributed as part of an app. You can also identify such reports by the Source Type attribute, which will have the value "App Report".

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

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 Platform.

Known issue

Description

The data set Report Usage Metrics Model is ingested, but it is not shown in the lineage.

The Report Usage Metrics Model is a data set that is automatically created by Power BI. This data set does not contain actual data and is not shown in the lineage.

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.

The Power BI API does not support real-time streaming, for example streaming models and data flows.

 Real-time datasets, semantic models with object-level security, semantic models with a live connection to AS-Azure and AS on-premises, and Excel full fidelity datasets aren't supported for subartifact metadata. For complete information, consult Microsoft's Real-time streaming in Power BI documentation.

Power BI assets that are moved to a different domain are moved back into the initial domain after synchronization.

Warning We highly recommend that you not move the ingested assets to other domains. If you do, the assets will be moved back to the initial Data Catalog BI domain (or domains) when you synchronize Power BI.

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

Calculated columns and measures in Power BI are ingested in Data Catalog as Power BI Column assets; however, you must first enable the DAX analysis via Collibra AI. This feature:

  • Creates column-level lineage that includes your calculated columns and measures in Power BI.
  • Enables stitching between calculated columns in the technical lineage and the corresponding Power BI Column assets in Data Catalog.

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.
Lineage is not shown for a paginated report.

The Power BI API does provide information about the dataset ID for paginated reports, so if lineage for a paginated report is not shown, refresh the dataset in Power BI.