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Connecting Power BI Gateway to Dremio

Brock Griffey

Overview

Often, customers using Dremio with Power BI have the need to move to Power BI Gateway . In order to set this up, customers will need to follow a few steps to get live connections with Dremio.

Requirements

  • Dremio Cluster.
  • System for PBI Gateway to run from (must be on 24x7 for live queries).
  • Power BI Desktop (for publishing).
  • Admin account for the Power BI website.

Setup Power BI Gateway with the Power BI Site

  1. Download & install the Dremio ODBC drivers. Make sure to checkmark the Power BI connector as well. image alt text
  2. Download Power BI Gateway.
  3. Install Power BI Gateway on the machine that will be running the bridge. The gateway must be available whenever a user interacts with the Power BI Dashboard on the Power BI website, otherwise queries will fail.
  4. Change the permission of the custom connector folder. Admin access is required to change the permissions.
  5. Go to the folder where the Dremio ODBC driver is installed. By default this is C:\Program Files\Dremio Connector:
  6. Right-click on Microsoft Power BI folder and select “Give access to” -> “Specific People…”
  7. On the Network Access dialog, type in “NT Service\PBIEgwService” and click “Add” to give the gateway service permission to read the directory.
  8. Click “Share” to share the directory, then click “Done”.
  9. Open the gateway software and navigate to the connectors section. Select the custom folder that the Dremio ODBC driver installed. By default this should be “C:\Program Files\Dremio Connector\Microsoft Power BI". Please ensure that the path ends with a “ \ “; otherwise the directory may not be found. Click “Accept” to change the path. The Dremio connector should show up now. image alt text
  10. Go to https://app.powerbi.com/
    1. Open “Settings”.
    2. Click the Manage gateways and select the gateway that was just installed. image alt text
    3. Check the “Allow user’s custom data connectors to refresh through this gateway cluster”.
    4. Click “Add data source to use the gateway”. image alt text
    5. Name your data source and select Dremio from the Data Source Type dropdown.
    6. Fill out the connection information.
    7. Set the encryption to Not Encrypted.
    8. Save. image alt text

Setup a Dashboard and publish

  1. Create a simple VDS in Dremio.
  2. Open the VDS in Power BI Desktop and create a simple workbook to be published.
  3. Make sure to sign into your Microsoft account.
    1. In Power BI Desktop click publish.
    2. Sign-in to https://app.powerbi.com/

Test Power BI live connection

  1. Open your workbook on the Power BI site.
  2. Verify the connection is submitting queries directly to Dremio.
    1. Open Dremio and check the jobs, make sure Power BI is submitting queries to Dremio.

After completing these steps, there should now be a live connection between the Power BI site and Dremio.