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Real data streaming in Power BI

  • 24 August 2023
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Hi,

I have one basic question on Cognite connectivity with PBI. Currently, I see, I have only one option as imported connection. Is there any way we can pull LIVE data from Cognite? We would like to have real data coming from cognite connected thru Power BI  if that’s possible.

 

Thanks in advance!

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Best answer by ipolomanyi 24 August 2023, 12:47

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Hi @Paramale Arati ,

DirectQuery is currently not supported for PowerBi CDF connector, only batched scheduled updates are possible.

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Thank you for response! Much appreciated.

Andre Alves
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Hi @ipolomanyi ,

Is there a projected release date for when this feature will become available in the Power BI CDF connector?

Out of curiosity, since the final solution is not yet available, could this be addressed by using a Push dataset, Streaming dataset, or PubNub streaming dataset?

Reference here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/service-real-time-streaming

André Alves
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we really need to upgrade the connector

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Hi @andrelcalves ,

I haven’t explored these options (Push dataset, Streaming dataset, or PubNub) myself, but from our experience such features usually require some sort of SQL-connection to be avaliable (similar to DirectQuery).

We did some development to enable CDF SQL-gateway before (codename Bumblebee), but it never matured past Alpha stage due to its complexity and non-standard authentication solution.

While it is possible in theory, it requires substantial piece of engineering work to support such features in PowerBi, and it most likely also means building an entirely new connector.

Everton Colling
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You are correct @andrelcalves, it is possible to create a scheduled job and push data from CDF to a push or streaming dataset in Power BI using the Power BI REST API.

It's not as simple as creating the report using the CDF Power BI connector, but it is a viable solution. In this case, we are not using OData to transfer data, but instead using a wrapper to fetch data from CDF REST API and pushing data to Power BI REST API.

I tested it a while ago just to confirm (followed this tutorial) and it worked fine. I created a simple Cognite Function and scheduled it to push data to Power BI every five minutes and it's been working fine since. I plan to write a tutorial here on the hub sharing how to use this method to stream data to Power BI datasets.

Everton Colling
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Here is the tutorial I promised.

As I mentioned before, this can be a valid solution to continuously push data from CDF to Power BI with a higher frequency. @Andre Alves  thanks again for the suggestion of using Power BI REST API endpoints.

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