DirectQuery / Bigquery / Billing

[Rinn]

Hi, 

I have a question about how billing works with DirectQuery requests in Power BI.

Context : I published a report on Power BI Services, with DirectQuery Bigquery Azure AD requests.

When an user goes to my report, how does billing go to Bigquery ? Through my or his ID account ? Must I give permission for him to request to my GCP project ?

Regards.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rinn 

Here are my suggestions for your reference:

Users who interact with Power BI reports do not query BigQuery directly; rather, Power BI performs this action on their behalf. Therefore, individual users do not need to have direct access to the GCP project. However, you need to ensure that the service account or authentication method that Power BI uses to connect to BigQuery has the necessary permissions to perform queries on the datasets in the GCP project.

The following points need to be considered:

• When setting up a connection to BigQuery, ensure that the Billing Program ID, which determines which GCP program will be billed for queries executed by Power BI, is properly configured in Power BI.
• The service account or authentication credentials that Power BI uses to connect to BigQuery must have sufficient privileges to execute the query. This is typically managed in the IAM settings of the GCP project.
• Since every query executed against BigQuery incurs a cost, consider optimizing your Power BI reports to minimize unnecessary queries. This includes using the query reduction options in Power BI and designing your reports to limit the number of queries sent to BigQuery.
• Regularly monitor queries and costs associated with GCP projects to manage and optimize spending GCP provides tools and reports to monitor usage and costs.

Best Regards,
Yulia Xu

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