Connect R to a Power BI Service data flow

[webportal]

Hello,

Does anyone know if it is possible to connect R to a Power BI Service data flow?

I'd like to do all ETL in Power BI data flow and analytics on R. I know it's not possible to run R scripts in data flows, like in Power BI Desktop Power Query, so I could download the data to R Studio and work from there.

Is this possible?

Thanks for helping!

[lbendlin]

One (crazy) way would be to connect from Power BI to the dataflow in Direct Query Mode and then use an R visual against the dataframe.  

Note that not all R libraries are supported in the Power BI service.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/service-r-packages-support

[RichardBoland]

Hi - I doubt that this would be satisfactory.  While R can be used in Power BI to make a visual, if its used to train a machine learning model, then there doesn't appear to be a way to reuse that model in the future.

I have to say, being able to do ETL in Power BI service and analysis in R sounds nice a nice way to operate.

[lbendlin]

As you know Microsoft is pushing their own AI/ML offerings in the Power BI service. I doubt they will go out of their way to support your use case.