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Microsoft Power BI Updates Blog

Announcing Single Sign-On Support when connecting to data sources from the Power BI Service

Headshot of article author Miguel Llopis

Group Program Manager - Data Integration
7 November, 2017

We’re glad to announce that it is now possible to use Single Sign-On, leveraging Kerberos, when connecting to certain data sources using DirectQuery mode from Power BI.

 

When a user interacts with a DirectQuery report in the Power BI Service, each cross-filter, slice, sorting, and report editing operation can result in queries executing live against the underlying on-premises data source.  When single sign-on is configured for the data source, queries execute under the identity of the user interacting with Power BI (that is, through the web experience or Power BI mobile apps). Thereby, each user sees precisely the data for which they have permissions in the underlying data source – with single sign-on configured, there is no shared data caching across different users.

 

Please note that you will need the latest On-premises data gateway release bits in order to use SSO. After installing those bits, this new option can be configured under “Advanced Options” in the Data Source registration page for On-premises data gateway sources.

 

 

You can find more details about how SSO works and what configuration steps are needed in this documentation article: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-gateway-kerberos-for-sso-pbi-to-on-premises-data/

 

Support for Single Sign-On is available for the following data sources as of today:

  • SQL Server
  • Teradata
  • SAP HANA (please read note at the end of this blog post)

 

Additional data sources will be added to this list between now and end of 2017 including Impala, Oracle and SAP BW. Others, such as Spark, will come early in 2018. As usual, please submit your feature requests on this area in the Power BI Ideas forum for future consideration.

 

Note regarding SAP HANA SSO support: To enable SSO for SAP HANA, you need to ensure the following HANA-specific configurations are met for SAP:

  1. Ensure the SAP HANA server is running the required minimum version, depending on your HANA server platform level:
  2. On the gateway machine, install SAP’s latest HANA ODBC driver. The minimum version is HANA ODBC version 2.00.020.00 from August 2017.