Forum Discussion

bdpr_95's avatar
bdpr_95
Helper IV
1 year ago

Extracting Report and Data Source Metadata from Power BI

Hi,   I have a request from my manager who wants to know if it's possible to extract from Power BI the information about how many reports we have, what the data sources are (e.g., Snowflake), and, ...
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bdpr_95's avatar
bdpr_95
Helper IV
1 year ago

But like this, I can only do it report by report. Imagine I have 1000 reports, this is going to be a painful task.

v-tejrama's avatar
v-tejrama
Community Support
1 year ago

 Hi again bdpr_95 ,

 

Yes, completely understand your concern doing this one by one for each report can get very time-consuming, especially when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of reports.

 

To handle this more efficiently, you can actually automate the entire process using a combination of Power BI REST APIs and XMLA connectivity. Using REST APIs, you can loop through all the workspaces and fetch the list of reports or datasets programmatically.

Then, for each dataset, you can connect via the XMLA endpoint and run TMSL or DMV queries to get detailed metadata like tables, columns, relationships, etc.

This approach helps you avoid doing it manually for each report and makes it much more scalable. You can use PowerShell or Python to script this out, and even schedule it to run regularly if needed.

 

Thank you.

 

  • v-tejrama's avatar
    v-tejrama
    Community Support
    1 year ago

    Hi bdpr_95 ,

     

    I wanted to follow up and see if you had a chance to review the information shared. If you have any further questions or need additional assistance, feel free to reach out.

     

    Thank you .

     

  • v-tejrama's avatar
    v-tejrama
    Community Support
    1 year ago

    Hi bdpr_95 ,

     

    I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the information provided. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.

    Thank you.

  • bdpr_95's avatar
    bdpr_95
    Helper IV
    1 year ago

    Hi v-tejrama, I don’t have any further questions, but I also can’t mark this as a solution since there’s no actual solution to my request, which was to get information at the schema level.

  • v-tejrama's avatar
    v-tejrama
    Community Support
    1 year ago

    Hi bdpr_95 ,

     

    Apologies for the inconvenience caused.

    You can definitely extract details like the number of reports, connected data sources (such as Snowflake), and schema information from Power BI using the Power BI REST API or Admin API, provided you have the right permissions.

    For your convenience, here are the official Microsoft documentation link:

    Power BI Scanner API

    The Scanner API is especially useful for accessing comprehensive metadata, including schema details, and integrates smoothly with notebooks or other processing tools.

    Best regards,
    Tejaswi.