Connecting Data Warehouse to PowerBI

Mike Cicerone
Mike Cicerone
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud CRM™ General Discussions
Hi,

Does anyone have experience using the Blackbaud Data Warehouse with Power BI? It seems when we connect the data warehouse, Power BI downloads the whole warehouse to the local machine. The machine then errors out when we try to do anything with the data.


Thanks in advance for any help or information.

Comments

  • Daniel Wood
    Daniel Wood
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1
    Mike,


    We currently have PowerBI connected to our BBDW with reports embedded within CRM. The BBDW is not really not designed for data modeling and their analysis server models are missing a lot of data. You need to use DirectQuery when setting up a new data source within PBI. I also found it easier to build views to present the data to PBI vs directly connecting to the tables. Happy to talk more via zoom if you wish.
  • Ellen Gee
    Ellen Gee
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge
    Hi Daniel,

    We connect PowerBI to the BBDW using DirectQuery for sourcing our data. How are you creating new views within the BBDW - backend with your DBA and Developer, a third party tool OR an in-house workaround?


    Thanks,

    Ellen
  • Daniel Wood
    Daniel Wood
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1
    Ellen,


    We do it within the SDK using the SQL View Spec and BBDW Martkey.
  • Liz Hackett
    Liz Hackett
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 3 February 2026 Monthly Challenge 2025 bbcon Attendee Badge

    Hi Mike,

    We have connected PowerBI to the Read Only Access version of CRM, but didn't have any luck with the BBCRM Data Warehouse

  • Satyavathi Atluri
    Satyavathi Atluri
    Tenth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    Hi Mike,

    We use an ODBC connection to Blackbaud (via a service account) to refresh Power BI data. As Daniel mentioned in his response, we too use SQL view spec within SDK and BBDW Martkey to extract data warehouse data for the reports.

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