Databricks has announced a new feature that allows users to use Databricks Workflows to automate the update of semantic models in Power BI with data from Unity Catalog.

This integration facilitates the updating and synchronization of semantic models directly from Databricks, enhancing efficiency and ensuring data is up to date for report and dashboard consumers in Power BI.

The company highlights several key benefits of this implementation:

• Direct Integration: Publish datasets from Unity Catalog to Power BI directly from data pipelines.

• Update Based on Data Changes: Significantly reduce update costs by refreshing semantic models only when data changes.

• Up-to-Date BI Data: Deliver fresh insights by automatically updating changes in underlying tables and their relationships.

With this advancement, you can now automate Power BI semantic model updates directly from Databricks Workflows. This eliminates the need to switch contexts between Databricks and Power BI, streamlining the process of making your data available for visualization and analysis in Power BI.

How Does It Work?

Let’s say you have an existing retail analytics data pipeline that ingests data from source databases and applies transformations and aggregations, resulting in a set of BI-ready tables.

To ensure that a Power BI semantic model stays synchronized with these changing data sets, you can add a Power BI task to your existing job in Databricks.

This task is configured by selecting a Power BI connection, workspace, and semantic model, and setting the authentication method. Once configured, each time your data pipeline runs, the Power BI semantic model will automatically be updated with any changes in the data.

This new functionality from Databricks simplifies the integration and automation of processes between Databricks and Power BI, enabling organizations to keep their reports consistently up to date—efficiently and effectively.

Want support implementing this solution? Write to us at comunicaciones@bpt.com.co

Source: https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-automatic-publishing-power-bi