Important: This post was written and published in 2019, and the content below may no longer represent the current capabilities of Power BI.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.

In the last few weeks I’ve seen a spike in questions related to the integration of Power BI dataflows and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Here’s a quick “status check” on the current state of this feature to get the answers out for as many people as possible.

• Power BI dataflows are generally available (GA) for capabilities that use the built-in Power BI-managed storage.
• Power BI dataflows integration with Azure is currently in preview – this includes the “Bring your own storage account” capabilities where you can configure Power BI to use your ADLSg2 storage account for dataflows storage, instead of using the built-in Power BI-managed storage.
• During preview, there are several known limitations:
  • Only a single ADLSg2 storage account can be configured for a Power BI tenant.
  • The storage account, once configured, cannot be changed.
  • The setup process to connect Power BI with ADLSg2 is somewhat lengthy and step-intensive.
  • To grant users other than the owner of the dataflow access to the dataflow in Power BI, you must grant them permissions to access the workspace in Power BI and grant them access to the CDM folder in ADLSg2.

These limitations will be addressed when this capability hits GA, but you should definitely be aware of them in the meantime. (You may also want to take a look at this MBAS session for an overview of the roadmap for the rest of this calendar year.)

I’ve seen customers take different approaches:

1. Some customers delay their integration of Power BI and ADLSg2, and are waiting for these limitations to be removed before they move forward.
2. Some customers adopt within the constraints of the preview, and choose a workload or set of workloads where the current limitations are acceptable.
3. Some customers set up a demo tenant of Power BI and use it to test and validate the ADLSg2 integration while deciding on option 1 or option 2.

I hope this helps. If you or your customers have any questions on this topic that aren’t answered here, please let me know!

[1] And they’re all documented. Nothing in this blog post is new, but hopefully it will help to have this summary online and sharable.