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
55 Comments
- +1 I am working with 4 companies that are requesting this feature
- This feature actually helps my customer to adopt Power BI as they look to separate the semantic layer from the reporting layer. Tableau is already planning for integration.
- Shift left => Semantic should be globally defined
- Shift left => Semantic should be globally defined
muchinskiResolver II
I've been listening from customers that they plan to move out of Power BI, if a good integration with Metric Views is not in place soon...- Right now, I am able to push from Unity Catalog straight to Power BI a relational model if I define the Primary and Foreign Keys correctly - but the metric views don't go through as measures. It would be awesome if this is integrated, so we can continue using the UC to Power BI integration and avoid duplicating measures across multiple semantic models.
- Totally agree that shift left on metric definitions and keeping it as close to the data as possible in unified semantic layer. Most orgs use multiple reporting tools, flexibility to leverage the same definition regardless of tool is paramount. Companies like dbt already embrace this and provide multiple tools to connect to a common semantic layer.
