How to read Primavera P6 into Power BI

[Anonymous]

Hello All, 

I am struggling, as how can I connect my power Bi desktop with Primavera P6, or is there anyway, so that I can read my data into Power BI from Primavera P6. Please do comment asap.

[paulciszewski33]

If your P6 or Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC) is hosted at Oracle, Oracle makes it difficult to connect Power BI to the P6 or OPC DB.  You need to extract the P6 or OPC data out of Oracle Hosting using a utility such as P6ETL (www.p6etl.com).  Actually, P6ETL can extract P6 data out of any hosted environment such as Loadspring.  P6ETL then stores the P6 or OPC data into a MSSQL DB (on-premise, at Azure, or at AWS).  Once the P6 or OPC data is in the MSSQL DB, you can create Power BI P6 and OPC dashboards.  And P6ETL will automatically update/refresh the P6 and OPC data in the MSSQL DB throughout the day

But, if your P6 DB is on-premise, you can connect Power BI to your P6 Native DB.  Checkout the “Primavera P6 Reporting with Microsoft Power BI” LinkedIn group (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13914226/).  There are a few videos to show you the steps for connecting Power BI to your on-premise P6 DB.

[paulciszewski33]

If your P6 DB (or OPC DB) is on Oracle Hosting, Oracle makes it very hard to connect Power BI directly to P6.  So that is why we developed P6ETL™.  

P6ETL™ is a utility that extracts P6 data and OPC data from Oracle Hosting – and loads the P6 and/or OPC data into a Microsoft SQL Server DB (we call it the P6ETL™ DB).

Once the data is in the P6ETL™ DB, users can create robust reports and dashboards using Power BI (or any report development tool).

To learn more about P6ETL™, visit www.p6etl.com or send an email to pciszewski@MustangTechnologies.com

On August 23rd and August 25th of 2022, we are providing a webcast on P6ETL™.  Learn more about P6ETL™ at the webcast. To register, click link: https://conta.cc/3Jm1LD4

[Anonymous]

thanks  , but into detail how you do it?

[Anonymous]

Hello @VahidDM 

The issue is the database administrator doesn't want me to directly connect to their system, he is giving me xer files and I am not able to read them into power bi.

Is there any way I can make them read ?

Thanks for your quick reply

[VahidDM · Accepted solution]

If the DBA doesn't want to give you the read access, you need to open the XER file with Excel (or Notepad), then connect that file to Power BI. 

Please click on the below links and read them.

Understanding Primavera XER Files 

P6 XER file using the XER File Parser 

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution  and click on  to help the other members find it more quickly.

[VahidDM]

Hi @Anonymous 

You can connect the Power BI desktop to the P6 database, and it depends on the type of your Primavera Database (SQL or Oracle).

You just need the Database address and access to the tables.

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution  and click on   to help the other members find it more quickly.