Power BI service to Snowflake connection

[Anonymous]

Hello,

Problem statement: We are trying to conncect Power Bi premium with a snowflake instance housed in AWS 

Details : Intially we wanted to achive this solution by installing a data gateway to act as bridge between Power BI service and snowflake virtual warehouses.

However, when we published the report to service(cloud), it is connecting to snowflake without a gateway and is also refreshing the data. All we did was enter credentials under data source settings , and it is working.

We want to know:

How is it working technically ; Given snowflake is in different cloud and not azure

What are pros and cons of gateway under this scenario?

[GilbertQ]

Hi there

It is possible because Power BI see's the data source as a cloud connection and when it is a cloud connection it does not need the gateway.

I would say without having the gateway it is better because there is nothing for you to manage in terms of having to look after the gateway or the connections. And possibly faster because it is managed by Power BI and does not have to go via your On-Premise network.

[TomMartens]

Hey @Anonymous ,

I totally agree with everything @GilbertQ mentioned already.

Maybe you want to consider using an enterprise gateway, because then it's possible to whitelist a single ip (namely the ip of the gateway machine) or multiple ips if you are using a gateway cluster.

Even if all our services are in azure in the same data center, there are certain datasets that require ip white-listing (requirements these datasets have to meet from a compliance and security perspective), and for this, we are using an enterprise gateway. There is a price we have to pay - performance. But this is something that we are willing to pay.

But as always, it depends.

Regards,

Tom

[Anonymous]

Hi @TomMartens and @GilbertQ 

Thank you for your help

The point I am not able to understand is - Our snowflake is in AWS ( Not Azure) - So why does power BI considering snowflake as a cloud source. . The only possiblity I am seeing is that our snowflake is using "Azude AD" authentication ; so is there a poccibility that the communcation ports between snowflake(AWS) and Power BI service( Azure ) are already open?

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi there

The Power BI Team recently updated how you can connect to Snowflake which is allowing this to now work

Here are the blog post details: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-enhanced-connectivity-for-snowflake/

[Anonymous]

@GilbertQ  but is this in general availability ( and not preview) And will miccorsoft provide support?

[GilbertQ]

Yes they will provide support if you log a support ticket, which is what I would suggest.