Important: This post was written and published in 2019, and the content below may no longer represent the current capabilities of Power BI. Please consider this post to be an historical record and not a technical resource. All content on this site is the personal output of the author and not an official resource from Microsoft.
Last week I delivered two online sessions on the topic of integrating Power BI dataflows with an organizational Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 storage account. I’ve blogged on this topic before (link | link | link | link) but sometimes a presentation and demo is worth a thousand words.
On April 30th I delivered a “Power BI dataflows 201 – beyond the basics” session for the PASS Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter. The session recording is online here, and you can download the slides here.
On May 4th I delivered a “Integrating Power BI and Azure Data Lake with dataflows and CDM Folders” session for the SQL Saturday community event in Stockholm, Sweden. I was originally planning to deliver the Stockholm session in person, but due to circumstances beyond my control[1] I ended up presenting remotely, which meant that I could more easily record the session. The session recording is online here, and you can download the slides here.
Each of these sessions covers much of the same material. The Stockholm presentation got off to a bit rocky start[2] but it gets smoother after the first few minutes.
Please feel free to use these slides for your own presentations if they’re useful. And please let me know if you have any questions!
Update: I delivered an updated version of this session on September 27, at the Power Platform World Tour in Vancouver, BC. There is no recording of this session, but the updated slides can be downloaded here.
[1] I forgot to book flights. Seriously, I thought I had booked flights in February when I committed to speaking, and by the time I realized that I had not booked them, they were way out of my budget. This was not my finest hour.
[2] The presentation was scheduled to start at 6:00 AM, so I got up at 4:00 and came into the office to review and prepare. Instead I spent the 90 minutes before the session start time fighting with PC issues and got everything working less than a minute before 6:00. I can’t remember ever coming in quite this hot…
BI Polar 
Reblogged this on MS Excel | Power Pivot | DAX | SSIS |SQL and commented:
Very good presentation. Easy to follow but still packed with useful information…
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Hi Mattheu
have you been able to use Dataflow + Data Lake Gen2 with a Pro account?
If I access an on-premises table (via gateway), I receive an error with the message that is a Premium requirement, when trying to refresh the dataflow.
Now if I connect to an Azure SQL Database I get an error that the credentials are missing …
best regard
I like heavy metal but I prefer punk rock 🙂
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This sounds unrelated to Pro vs. Premium. I am able to successfully use (and access) dataflows backed by an ADLSg2 storage account in a workspace in shared (Pro, non Premium) capacity.
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Matthew:
Once again, a great presentation. I would love to see more about ingesting Dataflows in SQL Server technologies. I would also like to know if U-SQL is being replaced or supplemented with a technology that will also work with Dataflows and CDM.
Thank you again!
Darryll Petrancuri
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Thanks Darryl!
Different Azure services (including SQL DW, and I assume SQL DB) are working on CDM Folder integration that makes sense for their services’ capabilities and the scenarios they support. Since this is my personal blog (and since they own their own roadmaps 😉 ) I can’t comment on anything that hasn’t been publicly announced, but I’ll share what information I can, when I can.
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Great stuff!
Any idea if “direct query” to CDM folder via dataflows will be supported?
I see a push from D365 to have real time data available on ADL gen2 near real-time but if your report only updates 8 (Pro) to 48 (premium) times a day you lose your near real-time insight. Also not having the “direct query” option on huge amounts of ERP data almost obliges one to go for Power BI Premium due to model size limits.
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Hi Jan – thanks for the question.
Please note that until new functionality is publicly announced I can’t really talk about it. We’re planning to announce some new dataflows capabilities at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit next month, so for now all I can say is “stay tuned.”
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In the context of the refresh limits, please also see this new post: https://ssbipolar.com/2019/05/24/unlimited-dataflow-refresh-on-power-bi-premium/
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Thx for the quick reply. Good to know, I guess the premium offer is getting more attractive by the day! #morebangsamebuck
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