Amid all the other announcements at Microsoft Build today came one I’ve been waiting for a long time: we can now build our own custom data connectors for Power BI. Here’s the announcement on the Power BI blog:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/data-connectors-developer-preview/
…and here are the docs:
https://github.com/Microsoft/DataConnectors
Although it might not sound that exciting, I think this is one of the biggest things that’s happened to Power BI in a long time. Microsoft’s most successful products are always the ones that are platforms for its partners to build their own solutions on top of, and Power BI is no exception. Custom visuals have made an important contribution to the success of Power BI as a whole, allowing third parties to build visuals that Microsoft either didn’t have the resources to build itself or didn’t realise people wanted. Similarly, custom data connectors will only increase the already impressive number of data sources that Power BI can connect to. My guess is that a lot of SaaS and data providers will want to build their own custom data connectors, and that the number of custom data connectors available is going to explode. Why go to all the trouble of trying to build BI and reporting features into your product when it’s quicker and easier to send the data to Power BI and your users get a much better experience as a result?
This doesn’t just affect Power BI though. Since the new Get & Transform functionality for loading data into Excel (see here) is based on the same Power Query technology that is used by Power BI, these custom data connectors will at some point work with Excel too. Although it will be a while before most Excel users upgrade to a version that supports custom data connectors, when that happens the sheer size of the Excel market means that there will be even more demand for custom connectors and this will in turn strengthen the Power BI ecosystem. Don’t forget that Analysis Services Tabular 2017 also now uses Power Query for loading data, so this will benefit corporate BI users too.
From a purely technical point of view today’s announcement included some welcome new capabilities for M coders like me. These include Visual Studio integration (intellisense for M!) and the ability to connect to web services and use OAuth for authentication, something that wasn’t really possible before. It’s also interesting that you can create custom data connectors that enable DirectQuery connections from Power BI, and that you aren’t limited to importing data.
I can’t wait to start using all these features and I’m sure they will be the subject of many future blog posts. Also, if you’re looking to hire someone with a good understanding of M to build a custom data connector, I’m your guy. You can find my contact details at http://www.crossjoin.co.uk/
