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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
2 years ago

Retrieve data from DynamoDB

Has anyone in the community successfully established a direct connection from Power BI to DynamoDB? If so, could you please share your approach or any insights you might have?
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freginier's avatar
freginier
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3 months ago

There's no native DynamoDB connector in Power BI, and DynamoDB (being a NoSQL key-value store) isn't really built for the scan-heavy analytical queries Power BI throws at a source, so "direct" connections tend to be painful. The approaches people use, roughly best to worst for analytics:

 

1) Export to S3 + Amazon Athena (recommended). Use DynamoDB's point-in-time "Export to S3" (or a Glue job), then query that data in S3 with Athena. Power BI has a native Amazon Athena connector (via the Athena ODBC driver), so this gives you a clean, refreshable connection and keeps the load off your live table.

 

2) Third-party ODBC driver. CData and Simba both sell DynamoDB ODBC drivers; install one, then use Power BI's ODBC connector. It works for direct access, but it's a paid driver and the queries hit the live table.

 

3) Replicate to a relational store (Redshift / RDS / Fabric) via AWS Glue, DMS or AppFlow, then point Power BI at that. Best if you need scheduled, governed reporting.

 

4) REST via API Gateway + the Web connector. Possible with Web.Contents, but you have to handle AWS SigV4 signing and paging yourself, so it's generally not worth it unless the dataset is tiny.

 

If this is for reporting/dashboards, option 1 (export to S3, then Athena) is usually the most reliable and cost-effective.