Connect Power BI Desktop to OBIEE Subject Areas using Direct Query - Step-by-Step User Guide

Modified on Thu, 26 Nov, 2020 at 5:55 AM

The following is a general tutorial for connecting from Power BI to OBIEE using Direct Query with BI Connector Desktop Edition.


Pre-requisites

  1. Microsoft Power BI Desktop December 2018 update or the latest version.
  2. BI Connector Desktop Edition for Microsoft PowerBI. (Step-by-Step Installation Guide for BI Connector Desktop Edition for Microsoft PowerBI)

Connecting from Power BI to OBIEE Subject Areas


Launch PowerBI

Launch Power BI Desktop. Select Get Data option.



Select BI Connector 

In the Get Data Dialog, scroll down and select 'BI Connector' and click Connect



Enter DSN Information

  • In the BI Connector dialog box ,Select Direct Query radio button.
  • Enter the DSN name that you configured after installing BI Connector.
  • Click Ok button.



Select a Subject Area

On successful connection, Click on the Database name and connect to the required database.


List of Subject Areas will be displayed. Select a Subject Area from the list.



Load Tables

Select one or more tables from the list and click on load.




Configure Relationships between tables

Note: BI Connector doesn't support bidirectional cross-filtering for DirectQuery. For more details, refer this article.


Manage Relationship

Click on Mange Relationship. Select 'New...' in the Manage relationship dialog as shown below.


Create Relationship

Select the Fact table from the drop down list as shown.


Select any dimension table from the drop down list as shown and related table to one another.


Select the column GZID on both tables, and select the cardinality to Many to one and click Ok button.


Note: GZID is a BI connector virtual column that is used to ensure that PowerBI uses OBIEE joins for the direct query.  

          Please make sure to select the fact table on the top and the dimension table on the bottom while creating the relationship.




Create Visualization


Drag and drop the columns from the fact and dimension tables.   Now you have created your first Power BI Visualization for OBIEE data.  Congratulations!



If you have any questions or issues creating a report, we are just a click away. Contact us at [email protected] or file a ticket at our support portal.