Forum Discussion
Access to dataflows automatic snapshots
Hey michaelsh ,
in general your admin can connect your organization’s Azure Data Lake Storage account to your Power BI tenant.
Then you can access the data from the dataflow that is saved in Azure Data Lake directly in the data lake.
See the following article for more details:
If you don't want to do that you can just use the data flow. The data will in the background be saved in data lake, but you don't have to deal with it and you also don't need a data lake license.
So if I don't have any special Data Lake and don't have an Azure license, then how can I access the snapshots?
Hey michaelsh ,
you load the data with a dataflow like you would load a regular Query in PowerQuery. The result is a table and physically it's stored in a data lake.
This table you can access in Power BI with data flow as a source. So if you load the data as snapshot with a load date or something similar, then you can query the data flow and select by MAX snapshot date. But that's up to you how you create that.
If you need any help please let me know.If I answered your question I would be happy if you could mark my post as a solution ✔️ and give it a thumbs up 👍Best regardsDenisBlog: WhatTheFact.biI still don't understand.
I work with Dataflows for two years. I also connect to the tables that are created by Dtaflows from within Power BI desktop using Power BI Dataflow as a source.
But where do I see snapshots?
By snaphots I mean copies of tables that were being created from previous runs.
I understand that it is possible to see them when connected to organizational ADLS Gen2, but if I don't have Azure ADLS separate license, is it possible to see the snapshots without it? And how?
Hey michaelsh ,
if you use a dataflow without your own data lake you just have a table at the end. So you have to implement snapshots. For example every load you could add a column "loaddate" that safes the load date. In the table you then would have to only load the snapshot you're interested in.
If you use your own data lake, then you can use all the features of Azure Data Lake Gen 2. But you have to use your data lake at the beginning. You cannot switch now afterwards to your own data lake.
Does that make sense?
If you need any help please let me know.If I answered your question I would be happy if you could mark my post as a solution ✔️ and give it a thumbs up 👍Best regardsDenisBlog: WhatTheFact.bi