Board SQL Connector (Inbound ODBC Driver)

Question

I am trying to export data from board that I can them import into Power BI using ODBC. I am unable to use the power bi addin due to the fact we are using a http site and do not have the Board Subscription Hub. This is for Board 12.5.Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Samson Sunny · Answer

Hi @Joel Bryant

There are other ways to get data into Power BI other than using the Power BI add-in connector. These methods are not something that Board supports but you can try them on your own.

Integrate Board into Power BI Service using Fabric as the orchestrator:-

Fabric Pipeline —> Lakehouse/Warehouse —> Semantic Model

* Use a Fabric Data Factory pipeline (Web v2 + Copy Data activity) to fetch token, call Board Public API Queries, and load the results into a Fabric Lakehouse or Warehouse.
* Build a Power BI semantic model in the Service on top of the Lakehouse/Warehouse, then create reports.

Dataflows Gen2 (Power Query Online) —> Lakehouse/Warehouse —> Semantic Model

* Use a Dataflow Gen2 with an M script to obtain a token and call Board Public API Queries, then write directly to a Fabric Lakehouse or Warehouse table.
* Build a Power BI semantic model in the Service on top of that table and report from it.

If you don't have fabric capacity, then you can push the data from Board (POST) via the REST API call step in the procedure into the Power BI workspace using the Push Datasets API endpoints. You would need the PostDataset and PostRows endpoints to create a new dataset and push rows into that dataset.

Kindly refer the Microsoft Power BI API documentation -

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/push-datasets

To use these endpoints, you would need to authenticate via OAuth2.0 client credentials for which you would need to register an Azure AD application to use with Power BI-

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/register-app