This post was authored by Sachin Thakur and Timothy Sepp
Data plays a critical role in the success of modern businesses and the ability to easily collaborate on data with business units, customers, suppliers, and partners is becoming increasingly important. Gartner predicts that by 2023, organizations that promote data sharing will outperform their peers on most business value metrics. By recasting data sharing as a business necessity, data and analytics leaders can have access to the right data at the right time, enabling more robust data and analytics strategies. For this to be successful, data consumers should be able to use shared data easily in their preferred platforms such as Microsoft Power BI, without investing in additional tools or processes. In this article, we will explore how, with the help of Databricks Delta Sharing and the Power BI connector, consumers can easily access current, ready-to-query data without any ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) operations, and gain insights using Power BI in minutes, making collaboration as simple and seamless as possible.
Why Databricks Delta Sharing is the Right Fit for Your Data Collaboration Needs
Traditional data-sharing solutions often have limitations, such as being tied to a single vendor or lacking open format, interoperability, and multicloud capabilities. To address these challenges, Databricks developed Delta Sharing.
Delta sharing is an open standard for secure data sharing that enables data providers to share ready-to-query data in open Delta Lake format across multiple clouds, regions, and data platforms while still maintaining a single copy of their data. This simplifies data operations by eliminating the need to load the data into multiple data-sharing platforms with disparate and proprietary data formats and reduces the cost of data sharing without the hassle of maintaining multiple copies of the data for different recipients.
Data consumers have direct access to current, ready-to-query data, using their preferred tools and data formats, without the need to be on the Databricks platform, thanks to native connectors for various programming languages and BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI, Rust, C++, R, Go, Java, Node.JS, Microsoft Excel and many more. This means that data recipients are not tied to a specific vendor or data format, eliminating vendor lock-in. To learn more about how Databricks' Delta Sharing can help your organization drive open data collaboration, watch the demo and read this free ebook.
Getting Started with Delta Sharing in Microsoft Power BI
Below you will find a step-by-step guide on using Power BI to query fresh data using a native Delta Sharing connector. You can also watch the detailed Power BI demo here.
Step 1: Using Get Data button select More in data sources
Step 2: Select Delta Sharing as the data source
Step 3: Add the Delta Sharing Server URL provided by the data provider.
Step 4: Add the bearer token, shared by the data provider, if you are connecting to the Delta Sharing server for the first time
Step 5: Power BI establishes the connection with the Delta Sharing server, enabling you to query the fresh data directly into Power BI, without any ETL
Conclusion
Delta Sharing, generally available in Azure Databricks and in Databricks on AWS and in public preview on GCP, can help your organization expand the reach of your data and drive open data collaboration across clouds and data platforms without being tied to a specific vendor. You can easily access data, across clouds or regions, with other users on the Databricks platform using Databricks-to-Databricks sharing and with users who are not on the Databricks platform using Databricks to open sharing. This allows you to collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders and make the most of your data.