Oracle connection

[robarivas]

I was able to successfully connect to Oracle but it was pretty tricky to set up (poor/minimal/complex documentation from Microsoft & Oracle). And even though I can connect, the speed/performance is poor in my opinion. I've tried both the standard Oracle connector in Power BI as well as through ODBC. I assume its because my driver/provider is not optimally configured (but maybe there is a different reason/issue). However, I’m not technically savvy enough to “improve” the configuration. Any idea why this is so difficult? Isn't Oracle a very common database product so shouldn't connecting to it in a highly performant way be kind of straightforward and fundamental to a BI tool like Power BI? Are there any blogs or something that dumbs down the configuration or setup? A lot of what I've seen talks about super complex steps (from a business analyst's perspective) like "placing the provider assembly into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and updating the machine.config with configuration section handler and DbProviderFactory information", whatever the heck that means, and requiring the need for software like Visual Studio. The "simpler" alternative seems to be to download/install a specific old version of ODAC--only ODAC 12c Release 4 (12.1.0.2.4) apparently. Had to figure that out on my own. Anyway, is there a magic setup to getting a performant connection to Oracle or do I just need to live with a slow connection (1 to 3 thousand rows per second in a non-scientific test)?

[AnnaMANNA14900]

Hi Community!

Sorry, just to clarify, what does it means The downer here is that you lose complete access to DirectQuery? Does it mean not all data set are received in PowerBI?

[Greg_Deckler]

I know of no easy button for that. I am shocked, shocked! that Microsoft and Oracle are not skipping hand-in-hand through a field of daisies...

Shocked...

[robarivas]

Cool.

So does anyone know the best (i.e., least bad) practice for setting up a Power BI/Query connection to Oracle? Because the Microsoft and Oracle documentation don't, in my opinion, lay out what that is.

[Anonymous]

What you are looking for is Ole DB. This is installed with the ODAC client you have already installed more than likely. Nobody is talking about it here because nobody knows about it without diving super deep into whitepapers.

Ole DB has the ability to take connection string properties which will drastically improve your import speed. This can be done utilizing connection string modifiers such as FetchSize and ChunkSize after building your connection string. The downer here is that you lose complete access to DirectQuery. But guess what... Microsoft and Oracle haven't made that faster either.