We’re excited to share that Power BI paginated reports will be able to connect through the on-premises data gateway to any data source with an ODBC option in Power BI Report Builder as public preview. This will allow you to migrate your reports from SQL Server Reporting Services to the Power BI service with the availability of a wider range of ODBC data sources!
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Now you can connect paginated reports to ODBC drivers such as SAP Hana, Redshift, Snowflake, Oracle, DB2, Vertica etc.
It is recommended to install the Power BI Gateway (version Feb 2021 or later available here ) on a separate machine from Power BI Report Builder. There are some scenarios where using the same machine might cause problems. For instance, DB2 does not allow 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to be installed side-by-side on the same machine. For Power BI Report Builder, you need to install the 32-bit version of an ODBC driver and the Power BI Gateway requires the 64-bit version. DSN and driver connection strings are both supported.
To configure an ODBC data source in the Manage Gateway page of the Power BI Service, choose “ADD DATA SOURCE” and then select the “ODBC” Data Source Type.
Next you paste in the connection string (System DSN or driver) and select an authentication method. For ODBC data sources the following authentication methods are supported: Basic , Windows . When you hit the ‘Add’ button the Power BI Service will connect to the ODBC data source using the supplied connection string and credentials to validate that the Gateway is able to connect. To learn more, check out the documentation on Power BI gateway and Report Builder support for ODBC data sources (preview).
We hope you’re as excited about this update as we are. Be sure to leave your feedback in the comments below, and feel free to submit your feature ideas .