Enable native Power BI integration with Databricks Metric View

[dhaneswara]

Today, Power BI semantic models (datasets/DAX) work well when Power BI is the only BI tool. However, many organizations use Databricks as their lakehouse and need consistent, governed metrics across multiple BI tools, ML pipelines, and APIs. When the semantic layer lives only in Power BI:

• Logic is duplicated across datasets and tools

• Governance/security (RLS/CLS, masking) is fragmented

• Schema changes in Databricks break reports

• ML/AI pipelines cannot reuse business logic from Power BI models

Proposal: Enable native Power BI integration with Databricks Metric View

[AntonPeters22]

Killer feature which we desperatly wait for at Sandvik.

[AntonPeters22]

Killer feature which we desperatly wait for at Sandvik.

[GlucabFassiData]

Interoperability between Databricks and Power BI is essential for us, this would be perfect for our future data lakehouse project with power-bi for dashboarding and reports.

[mohitka]

I see the feature is in Beta now --> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/partners/bi/power-bi-metric-views

[rfissa]

Absolutely necessary for powerBI customers

[cscashby]

+1 - many large Enterprise customers rely on this. My specific customer is in the middle of a wholesale migration to GCP. They are intending to keep PowerBI in play, but may well look to Google's Looker, or to use another BI platform if this capability is disabled.

[AlexanderKornMS]

please don't do it. Not a fan of having muliple layers for defining my KPIs. The semantic layers should be where the user sits and not where the data engineer likes it best.

[cscashby]

@AlexanderKornMS - interesting take. If the data engineers are defining your semantics, then there's something wrong in the first place. Surely where all consumers can access it is the whole point here - and not all consumers will be using PowerBI, including and especially in the world of multi platform agentic, which is here to stay.

[philippesv]

We operate multiple Power BI dashboards using Databricks as the data source. To improve metric governance, consistency, and reuse, we propose moving the business layer (metric View) to Databricks while continuing to use Power BI for visualization and user interaction. The goal is to centralize KPI definitions without losing Power BI capabilities. If this is not feasible, alternative BI strategies may need to be evaluated. thank you a lote

[Devan_Ferguson]

We are a government division who require Power BI to operate our reporting side, but use Databricks for all of our ingestion and data preparation up to the semantic models and gold layer. We just recently saw the warning that Microsoft has removed the BI compatibility mode option from the Power BI connector to Azure Databricks. We are still in the early enough stages of integration into Power BI for our reporting and will be reverting to Tableau and just using Databricks AI/BI for the time being until Microsoft implements a solution to allow us to use Metric Views and semantic models built and maintained in Databricks. @AlexanderKornMS - Not sure a Microsoft employee should be shutting down requirements that Microsoft clients are asking for. We require DirectQuery mode to contain the governance and auditability of Databricks when users access the data. With direct query mode, all measures performed in Power BI take forever to return the values, and drilling down can take even longer. If users enable Import Mode to get around the wait times, this removes any form of governance -- A limitation of the Power BI tool itself. Allowing the metric views from Databricks to be ingested into Power BI allows the governance to continue and for users to continue using pre-modeled data.