Are you going through the cumbersome process of recreating the reports in Power BI everytime you connect to a new OBIEE or Oracle Analytics Cloud(OAC) environment (typically Dev, UAT and Prod)?

If your answer is yes, it doesn’t have to be so laborious. There is a much easier and faster way to move reports from Development to production environments. The process doesn’t have to be cumbersome anymore!

For instance, let’s assume a report is developed from scratch initially in Power BI and it’s configured to fetch data from one of the environments (say Dev). Now the same report can be brought to life with data from other environments (UAT or Prod) just by simply pointing the data source to the corresponding environment, rather than redeveloping the report for each of the environments.

With BI Connector, this is achieved in a matter of seconds. The need to redevelop the reports is eliminated, and hours of effort is saved!

Before we jump into the steps, it is important for you to know the existing type of connectivity used by BI Connector to connect the OBIEE environments and Power BI. It should be either through

1. ODBC protocol (or)
2. The custom connector of BI Connector listed in Power BI (highly recommended)

If you’re using BI Connector via ODBC protocol, please follow these steps after developing the report for the Dev environment –

1. Navigate as below in Power BI Desktop –
   File -> Options & Settings ->Data Source Settings -> Data Sources in current file



2. Select the existing DSN
3. Click the Change Source button



4. In the dialog box that opens up, select the DSN of the corresponding OBIEE environment, and click Ok



5. Click Close



6. Click Refresh in Power BI Desktop to load the data from the selected environment

There you go!

If you’re using BI Connector as a custom connector in Power BI, please follow these steps after developing the report for the Dev environment –

1. Open the ODBC Data Source Administrator in Windows
2. Select the DSN of the Dev environment, and click configure



3. Change the connection credentials alone – server name, port number, username and password pointing to the new Data Source (UAT or Prod environment) and don’t make any change to the DSN



4. Click the test connection button and validate the connection. Successful connection shows the below message



5. Click Save and Ok




6. Open Power BI desktop and clear the cache (Refer this article on clearing cache in Power BI)
   Note – Though this step is optional, it is highly recommended as a proactive step to avoid loading the cached data

Now hit refresh on the Power BI report. Sit back and watch it loading data from the desired environment.

Interested in speeding up your OBIEE report creation and deployment using Power BI and BI Connector?

Try BI Connector!