Connecting Microsoft Power BI to Amazon Redshift

Progress DataDirect for Amazon Redshift and the OData service of DataDirect Cloud enable rapid BI and analytics with Microsoft PowerBI.

Power BI is Microsoft’s cloud-hosted, self-service business intelligence (BI) solution. Like Tableau, which I’ve talked about a lot in the past, Power BI gives business users and analysts the ability to visualize their data in order to gain deep insight into their customers, operations and processes.

One of the great things about Power BI is the wealth of data sources and connectivity options it supports, including ODBC and OData. No matter what method you choose, Progress has a high-performance solution for you.

Connecting to Amazon Redshift with ODBC

In the past, we’ve touted our Progress DataDirect Amazon Redshift ODBC driver for its blazing fast performance when loading data into Redshift, but it’s just as powerful when pulling data out. So, to follow up Dennis Bennett’s awesome demo and recap of Sumit Sarkar’s “Million Row Challenge,” I thought I’d show off some of the capabilities of our Redshift driver when the data is flowing in the opposite direction. Check out this short video I put together demonstrating DataDirect connectivity to Redshift from Power BI.

Connecting to Amazon Redshift with OData

OData is a standardized protocol for creating and consuming data APIs. In other words, it’s a standard for providing access to data over the Internet in real-time.

OData builds on core protocols like HTTP/s and commonly accepted methodologies like REST, and allows mobile and web applications to query data sources much more easily than force fitting SQL to them.

Progress® DataDirect Cloud® accepts OData query requests, translates them to SQL, and forwards that SQL to your data source to be executed. Applications can then invoke the OData service and consume this OData using any of the common clients that provide HTTP or web service access.

Though the most common use case we’ve seen for this service so far has been providing access to external data through Salesforce Lightning Connect, it is also useful for connecting to Power BI for real-time analytics. In the following video, I demonstrate this connectivity from Power BI to Amazon Redshift through our DataDirect Cloud service.

Power up BI with DataDirect Amazon Redshift Drivers

Whether you are loading data into or pulling data out, DataDirect offers connectivity to Amazon Redshift that blows the competition away. Grab a free trial of our Amazon Redshift ODBC driver or sign up to evaluate DataDirect Cloud and start getting the most out of your Redshift data today.