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Levien's avatar
Levien
Icon for Advocate I rankAdvocate I
9 years ago
Solved

connecting a SQLite database

Hi,   I'm trying to connect to a (local) .db file, created in SQLite3. Anyone any idea how this could work out? Thanks & regards,   Levien
  • pkoetzing's avatar
    pkoetzing
    9 years ago

    Hi,

     

    You need to install a SQLite ODBC driver (look here: http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc) on your local machine. Then "Get Data" - "ODBC" and enter "database=C:\mysqlite.db" as connection string. This works at least for the PowerBI Desktop.

     

    /Peter

AdB_umc's avatar
AdB_umc
Regular Visitor
3 years ago

The sollution by pkoetzing is correct. You need to install the ODBC driver on you machine. Then you can connect to a SQL lite Db in PowerBi Desktop via the ODBC connection on your machine.

This even works in the PowerBi service: Publish the report in the service. Install a gateway on the same machine who has the ODBC connection. Make sure this machine is powered ON and the same user who used the ODBC connection is logged on and the PowerBi Service can refresh your data via the gateway. This is working stable in our organization for a couple of years now. The only downside: the user needs to be logged in on the Machine with the Gateway for the ODBC refresh to work. Other platforms (SQL server) might not have this problem, however we do not feel the need to change our setup, since ODBC connection works like a charm in our environment (with SAS software creating the dataset and PowerBi reporting it). 

Extra answer regarding the connection in the service since there still are questions regarding SQLlite and PowerBi alltough there are now numerous howto's:

sqlite - How to connect Power BI with the website database - Stack Overflow