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Connect BI tools to Unity Catalog

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This article provides information about connecting business intelligence (BI) tools to Unity Catalog. It lists typical integrations, followed by a table that compares BI tool support for Unity Catalog and other Azure Databricks features.

JDBC

To access data registered in Unity Catalog over JDBC, use Simba JDBC driver version 2.6.21 or above.

See Databricks JDBC Driver.

ODBC

To access data registered in Unity Catalog over ODBC, use Simba ODBC driver version 2.6.19 or above.

See Databricks ODBC Driver.

Looker

To use data managed by Unity Catalog in Looker, use the Simba JDBC driver version 2.6.21 or above. See Connect to Looker.

Power BI

To access data registered in Unity Catalog using Microsoft Power BI, use Power BI Desktop version 2.98.683.0 or above (October 2021 release).

See Connect Power BI to Azure Databricks.

Tableau

To access data registered in Unity Catalog using Tableau, use Tableau Desktop version 2021.4 with Simba ODBC driver version 2.6.19 or above.

See Connect Tableau and Azure Databricks.

Fabric

To learn about using Microsoft Fabric to access data registered in Unity Catalog, see Use Microsoft Fabric to read data that is registered in Unity Catalog.

Supported features by BI tool

Feature Power BI* Tableau* Looker JDBC/ODBC Fabric
End-user authorization ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Audits ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Lineage ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Row- and column- level security ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Lakehouse federated data ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Delta Sharing data ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Query objects secured with grants ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Dynamic views ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Materialized views ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Streaming tables ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X
Python functions & AI models via SQL ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ X

*Configured using live query mode.