Unable to connect Power BI Dataset (Semantic Model) to Fabric Lakehouse using Service Principal

[mrmossevig]

Hi,

I'm building a new solution using Lakehouses and Notebooks as the backbone of the organizational data transformation.

Last step is to coalescence all the data in a Power BI Semantic Model (Dataset). The dataset is built but now I want to schedule a refresh using a service principal.

I've added the service principal and given the group it's part of access to the Lakehouse, and enable the capacity to use service principal.

When I add the service principal in the credentials part of the Semantic Model, it fails with:

Failed to update data source credentials: Login failed due to invalid authentication methods.

Is it possible to connect to Lakehouses from Power BI Services using Service Principals?

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

Hi. I don't think that's possible. The configuration of a source that is from Fabric or PowerBi Service it's only available for Azure Entra ID Auth yet. It might change in a near future, but now you should edit credentials of an account and then you can run the refresh with script using service principal if you want. That's because of the way power bi works, you could use scripts to get data from onelake using service principal but as far as I haven seen the Power Bi Auth2 for the source doesn't allow that yet. I repeat "yet" because it might change in a future.

I hope that helps,