Power BI Enhancements/Limitations

StevenK

The following will be primarily based on my recent experiences with the Power BI Connector and Anaplan. 

Positives:

1. The Authentication has much improved and the use of SSO relieves a lot of data concerns when creating Power BI Reports. 

2. Able to run multiple exports into the same model

Negatives:

In my experience and due to need, I have a large export that equals ~2GB (well below the 5GB Limit). Following that export there are 3-4 much smaller ones that pull the summarized details so I don't need to do any manipulation in Power BI. The export for the entire model fails because of how the connector functions. Either multiple requests are submitted at once and the Anaplan Model/API cannot support it, or one export submits before the other one completes. Either way, I had to scrap the entire Power BI Model because it couldn't be depended on.

Enhancement Request:
I would request Anaplan release more documentation and gather more feedback from customers on Power BI functionality and performance. It seems like a bug that one request kicks off before another one completes, there's only so much you can control within a Power BI model to limit calls. 

david.savarin

From our own experience, The underlying anaplan api is unstable currently, so that may be one side of the issue there (the other one possibly being how the power bi connector handles the api query calls)

avachris

Can you expand on this?

I have a very sparse data model, and so we are contemplating using power bi to be the custom reporting engine for our forecast users. Ideally we are dropping this into a S3 bucket and attacking it there, our infrastructure isn't there just yet.

AlefyaVyas

Hi,

Has there been any update on the Power BI Connector? When I created my queries / connections between Anaplan & Power BI they worked fine initially. Now as we add steps/transformations into the Power BI Query, it connects to Anaplan and has slowed down tremendously. As mentioned earlier, sometimes the export runs once and sometimes runs one after another. Either way this connector needs more stability, any ideas or workarounds?

david.savarin

@avachris : we went with something similar using a datalake system between anaplan and dataviz tools, this using cloudworks to trigger targeted exports from anaplan.

Now that cw has flows integrations, you can chain multiple exports across models to have synced exported data.

Good part is thanks to bigquery or other cloud data storages, their high availability is far superior to anaplan freezing during action, so powerbi reports can always run and refresh on top of them without running into the same kind of issues as the anaplan connector.

I wish anaplan would submit their codes to an open project so people around the world could enhance connectors and such and fix those pesky bugs

atithipawar25