Yesterday my colleague Naoufal Ahaytaf was pining me if I’ve seen the latest news, and LinkedIn was exploding. Apparently Microsoft dropped support for “the BI compatibility mode option from the Power BI connector to Azure Databricks”, and therefore Metric Views are no longer working in PowerBI anymore. Worrying that PowerBI wouldn’t work with Databricks at all anymore was luckily not the case (and would be really strange to be honest).
Since many people were long waiting for this, it feels a bit like a bummer that the support dropped overnight. But when checking the documentation of the “Query metric views from BI tools” I noticed something very important: The function is still in Beta, which means It’s not to be used in production, it’s not stable (as we noticed), and there is no Service Level Agreement applicable.
In the last few years we moved functionality as soon as possible to the end users, gathering feedback and test it in the field. But in this process of fast delivery of functionality, we seem to forget to validate production readiness.
For me the following are the real takeaways for this:
🔹Start with verified architecture that meets your requirements;
🔹Take the productization of your workloads seriously;
🔹It’s OK to use new functionality in beta/preview, as long as you accept the risks;
🔹Always have a Plan B ready and expect unforeseen changes.
For some background info, see this blog from Chris Webb:
🔗Power BI and support for third party semantic models
And off course the documentation where it states that it’s not supported anymore:
🔗 Query metric views from BI tools – Azure Databricks | Microsoft Learn
And as final, don’t forget to vote to get this functionality back (and supported in the end):
🔗 Enable native Power BI integration with Databricks… – Microsoft Fabric Community
For the original LinkedIn post click here.
