A way to connect Power BI desktop to Gateway connection

[Burek]

We are trying to find a way to connect Power BI desktop to Gateway connection.

Gateway machine is the only one that is able(by design) to connect to the Amazon Athena server by using ODBC connection and Instance Profile as auth(role instead of user).

We have setup DSN in Gateway. Connection is working in Power BI Service.

Is there a way to connect local machines to gateway connection because local machine are not passing auth (by design)?
What other solutions are there? PBI Dataflow and Datamarts seems to be too slow for that amount of data.

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

Hi. You can't make PBI Desktop use a Gateway. There is no way to do that. Your company might need to reconsider one of two things:

- Installing PowerBi Desktop at the Gateway VM and let developers access to use it. That way you will be able to use the odbc driver.

- Grant permission to other local machines (Public IPs) to use Athena so that you can just install ODBC on your machine and use Power Bi Desktop from there.

Usually the second one is the most popular. IT Department should understand that a PBI Developer needs access to data in order to work correctly. You should be able to install the driver and log in.

Yes, you could use Dataflow/Datamart as a third alternative, but those technologies are not for any use case. If it's a lot of data you might need to transform it in athena before loading it so that PowerBi just loads and nothing else.

I hope that helps,

[wikkleyn]

Hi @Burek I agree with @ibarrau . We went through something similar recently. To add, did you whitelist the desktop IPs?