Support Power BI as an underlying Cube.js data source

[dlawrences]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Cube.js supports a nice set of data sources thus far (traditional RDBMS systems, cloud data warehouses, MPP analytical services etc.), however I have been part of organisations trying to leverage Azure Analysis Services Tabular/Power BI Premium semantic models to create and extend much of the analytical logic that would be exposed from an Enterprise Data Warehouse so that it can respond to user input (filters), user context (RLS etc.) in a fast and scalable manner.

Describe the solution you'd like
Power BI Premium semantic models have been extended to supports dataset querying via REST API (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/execute-queries), expecting queries leveraging DAX. This makes it possible for downstream systems and consumers to query tabular models hosted on Power BI Premium which means that measures used by dashboards/reports can be re-used and exposed as expected.

The solution implies that Cube.js can expose dimensions, hierarchies, fact structures and measures from Power BI Premium semantic models (or Azure Analysis Services Tabular since they are similar) to enable data viz tooling/other systems to leverage the fast compute of this BI ecosystem, as well as its extensibility for rich business-centric measures.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Systems like CData API Server (https://www.cdata.com/apiserver/) provide such extensibility over Analysis Services Tabular models, but only through leveraging MDX queries instead of DAX queries which do not query the model as efficiently and do not provide the same functionality.

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I realise this is a chonky feature set and I am happy to support you guys with any Power BI/Analysis Services information. I do not have the bandwidth to contribute to this right now, but I am actively looking in our organisation for some people that can help.

[ivan-vdovin]

Hi @dlawrences !
Thanks for posting this. Let me check the dev team's plans here.

[emile-blake]

Hi @dlawrences, I have the same need. A connector that queries tabular using DAX instead of MDX. Did you find an alternative solution?

[igorlukanin]

Our vision is to support Power BI as a downstream rather then upstream tool: https://cube.dev/docs/product/configuration/visualization-tools/powerbi