Understanding Power BI Endpoints

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In its early days, Power BI introduced an endpoint to support Analyze in Excel (AIXL). Later, the “Power BI datasets” connector relied on this endpoint to support connecting to published datasets. The AIXL endpoint was never intended to support other clients. It has a few limitations, such as it doesn’t support long running requests and write operations. Also, it doesn’t support importing data as you’ve probably found when connecting to published datasets.

Later, Power BI Premium added the XMLA endpoint to support external clients connected to datasets in a premium capacity. If you’re on Premium, you should use the XMLA endpoint to connect external clients by using the Azure Analysis Services connector. Unfortunately, if you do so in PBI Desktop, “Get Data” won’t give you the nice UX that shows you which datasets are certified.

It will be nice if Microsoft adds a mechanism in the future where the client libraries will automatically take the new style of connection string (workspace + dataset name) and redirect to the AIXL endpoint if the dataset is hosted in a shared capacity or the XMLA endpoint if the dataset is in Premium. Or even better, support the XMLA endpoint for both shared and premium capacities.

In summary:

  • AIXL and PBI Desktop use the AIXL connections.
  • You should never use AIXL connection strings directly.
  • Business users should continue using the “Power BI datasets” connector.
  • Other external clients should use the XMLA endpoint to connect to a dataset in a premium capacity.

Updated Export Settings

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A Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I’m thankful for your interest in and support of my work.

I’m glad that Microsoft has recently updated the Power BI tenant export settings and thus mitigated the the complaints I had in my “A False Sense of Data Security” blog. Disabling the “Export to …” settings, which now applies also to paginated reports, no longer disables live connections to published datasets and features that depend on it, such as connecting to published datasets in Power BI Desktop, accessing the Power BI Premium XMLA endpoint, and Analyze in Excel. Instead, there is a clear distinction and  now there two separate settings that affect external connectivity (for XMLA connectivity, the XMLA Endpoint capacity setting must be enabled in Read-Only or Read-Write modes):

  • Allow live connections – This is a catch-all setting for allowing the live connectivity features.
  • Allow XMLA endpoints and Analyze in Excel with on-premises datasets — Microsoft felt that there should be a separate setting (besides “Allow live connections”) for connecting to on-prem datasets. However, just like disabling “Allow live connections”, this setting also effectively disables the Power BI Premium XMLA endpoint preventing other tools, such as Visual Studio or SSMS, to connect to published datasets.