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Announcing General Availability (GA) of enhanced connectivity for Snowflake

Headshot of article author Kay Unkroth

We are excited to announce the that the enhanced capabilities added recently to the Power BI Snowflake connector are now GA, including the ability to connect to Snowflake without an on-premises data gateway as well as support for Azure Active Directory (AAD) authentication and SSO in DirectQuery mode in the Power BI service.

The enhanced connector capabilities streamline how Power BI accesses Snowflake data warehouses in three ways:

  • Removing the requirement for an on-premises gateway and thus eliminating the friction associated with deploying and managing gateways.
  • Providing a new authentication method for Snowflake through AAD. Snowflake user identities can be synced with AAD to enable data access.
  • Enabling SSO with Power BI based on AAD authentication. With SSO enabled in the data source definition, users opening or refreshing a report in DirectQuery mode are authenticated and authorized seamlessly with their Power BI (AAD) identities to access Snowflake.

The following screenshot shows how to enable SSP for a Snowflake data source.

If you find the SSO option (checkbox at the bottom of the screen) unavailable, then contact your Power BI service admin to enable the corresponding tenant setting under Tenant settings in the Power BI Admin portal, as depicted in the next screenshot.

The enhanced Snowflake connector is the result of an on-going collaboration between the Power BI and the Snowflake product teams. For further details, see the enhanced Snowflake connector documentation for Power BI Desktop, for Power BI Service, and this article on the Snowflake website.

Additional resources

To learn more, check out the following webinar on how to build scalable BI solutions on your Snowflake Cloud Data Platform using Power BI: Build Scalable BI Solutions Using Power BI and Snowflake.