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Anonymous
Not applicable

How to create an upsert dataflow?

Situation:

  • Source data needs to be upserted into a destination table. 
  • Prefer to use only Power Bi/ Power Platform SaaS tools 
  • Prefer to avoid using Azure services
  • Prefer wysiwyg tools
  • I can pull the data from the source system using the existing text/csv connector. 
  • I expect that I will need to use one or two dataflows and I am comfortable with recurring schedules. If two dataflows are needed, I hope the second one will run automatically after the first one is done. 
  • I am building this in a brand new account/environment
  • I am fine if this is done using the new datamart features

Problem:

  • I am inexperienced with how the Power Platform tolls are "meant" to be used
  • I would expect that I need to pull the data into a table, then run a dataflow that reads from the source table and destination table, then does the upsert and finally writes back into the destination table. I can't figure out how to do this. 
  • I don't know what licenses/permissions I need to make sure I have all the necessary tools. I am fine paying for the MSFT services necessary to make this possible 

 

Goals

  • Produce the "most simple" approach to get this upsert working within Power BI/Power Platform
  • Prefer to use minimal license costs... simplicity takes priority.
  • I need to understand what licenses/tools/permissions are needed
    • Power BI Premium? Power Platform Premium? Dataverse? Azure data lake?(seems this is where dataflows save data when set as Analytics type), ect.

 

How can I configure Power BI/Power platform to solve this upsert use-case?

 

I greatly appriciate help and guidence on the approach, tools, and steps needed to make this work as simply as possible. 

 

 

 

 

 

3 REPLIES 3
SqlBobScot
Helper III
Helper III

To the best of my knowledge what you want to do is not possible at this moment in time with Power BI or Power Platform DataFlows. The best solution is to consider using Azure Data Factory, that would allow you do what you are asking for.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Thanks for the reply. It is quite disappointing to hear. I hope that others may know of a way. Thank you for providing me with a direction to investigate. 😀

As a rule of thumb, Power BI is just for reading data, not for updating data sources. Good luck; ADF is a powerful toolset that does some fantastic things. We have built solutions similar to the one you describe using ADF.

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