RavenDB Features 5.3: Power BI integration

RavenDB is an OLTP database, it is meant to be the backend of business applications. There are some features in RavenDB that are meant for reporting purposes, but that is quite explicitly not our main focus. That is part of why RavenDB has such good integration with the rest of the environment, to give you the ability to use the best tool for the job.

With RavenDB 5.3, we are now allowing you to integrate directly with Power BI, so you can pull data from RavenDB to Power BI, write reports and in general utilize the full power of Power BI with your RavenDB data.

The image on the right, for example, is a report generated inside of Power BI on top of the sample data from RavenDB.

As you can imagine, I’m particularly stoked about this feature. Not only does it make reporting integration with RavenDB a lot simpler, the way that we do it is quite interesting. Instead of diving to the technical details, it would probably be more fun to show you how it works, from the perspective of Power BI.

The first thing we need to do is connect Power BI to RavenDB, using your existing Power BI system, you can simple click on Get Data and select:

You’ll then need to provide the connection details:

You’ll then be presented with the following dialog:

As you can see, we are translating the JSON documents inside of RavenDB to a columnar format for ease of processing inside of Power BI.

You can even take this further and issue RQL queries directly from inside of Power BI and transform the data. That means that you can utilize indexes, map/reduce operations, etc. Take a look:

And the result inside of Power BI:

As you can imagine, this is going to be a powerful tool in how you can work with your RavenDB data. You can also take this further and integrate that with Power BI on Azure, of course.

The way this works behind the scene is that we can now understand PostgreSQL wire protocol. That means that we can now be accessed from anywhere that can connect to Postgres. While the PostgreSQL protocol implementation is still marked as experimental, we have put the Power BI integration through its paces and we consider that stable enough for regular use.

Happy reporting .

This feature is part of the RavenDB 5.3 release (expected in mid November) and is available in the Enterprise edition of RavenDB.