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k-squared
Frequent Visitor

Maximum length of column name while using DirectQuery

I have a large SQL table in Snowflake where the column names are automatically generated and am having trouble using some, but not all of the volumns, in Power BI Desktop visuals, meaning I cannot, for instance, pull one of the columns into a Matrix to see the values.

One requirement is that I must use DirectQuery given the large size of the table. I also have Tableau and have noticed it is able to pull the same column data in without a problem so do not think there's an issue with the underlying SQL table. 

Whenever I try to pull the problem fields in, I get the following error: 

"Couldn't load the data for this visual"

Error message says "OLE DB or ODBC error: The command '[embedded SQL statement here]' isn't supported.."

I have found this appears to happen when column names exceed 128 characters. Is there a hard limit on the number of characters a column name can have? If so, is there a reason why this limit is so low? 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
k-squared
Frequent Visitor

Yes, that's what I ended up doing for now (though I did it on the SQL end to preserve consistency across files/applications) but not an ideal solution.

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2 REPLIES 2
k-squared
Frequent Visitor

Yes, that's what I ended up doing for now (though I did it on the SQL end to preserve consistency across files/applications) but not an ideal solution.

amitchandak
Super User
Super User

@k-squared , You can rename the column in power bi. the source name will remain the same.

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