Power BI with Teradata Report Considerations
In recent times, I am using Teradata Database and connecting with Power BI Desktop and Report Builder. I want to share my experience so that it might be helpful to others.
My setup – I am connecting the Teradata database through VPN and I don’t have access to use windows authentication to connect with Teradata from my system. We need to use LDAP authentication to connect from system to Teradata database.
Quick Bytes – LDAP is nothing but “Lightweight Directory Access Protocol” and it is helping us to access the directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. You can learn more information in online.
Power BI Desktop
From Power BI Desktop, we can connect to Teradata either using Windows Authentication or Database Authentication.
If you see my above scenario, i can’t connect with windows or database. Teradata DBA has enabled LDAP for any users who want to connect the database using VPN. LDAP is one of the authentication which is not available as default. We need explicitly make LDAP enable for Power BI Desktop.
Need to install Teradata client driver and then need to run the below command in command prompt.
setx PBI_EnableTeradataLdap true
The will enable LDAP as one of the authentication method in Power BI Desktop as like below.
We can use LDAP to connect with Teradata and can import the tables into Power BI.
Power BI Desktop with Teradata via Direct Query.
As we all know, Direct query is something that will run the query against database when user run the report, query will be triggered and run against database through Gateway. My understanding was, we can use any authentication to connect with database from Power BI Desktop and when we publish to service it is always use the account which we use on the gateway data source. The below scenario gave me the new understanding on Direct Query with Teradata again via LDAP.
I have used Direct query using LDAP and report and was working fine in the Power BI Desktop. Once I published the report to Service and mapped with Gateway Service account data source, we got the below error message.
When we see the error message, we can understood something that there is an issue with Gateway service account access but really not.
The file which I use same LDAP with Import mode is working fine on schedule refresh but only direct query is not working in the service. We have done many analysis and finally found that LDAP method which is used on the PBIX file is the problem. It means the Power BI Desktop file with Taradata LDAP is not working in the service with Direct Query.
Finally, we got the database account and it resolved the issue.
Conclusion – We need to make sure to choose proper default authentication method in Power BI Desktop when we deal with direct query in Power BI Service.
If anyone from Microsoft team see this, please let me know – is this a bug or known issue?
Happy Learning!!