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Microsoft Idea

Power BI

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relate dynamic subsets of external and internal data models between organizations in power bi desktop

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Varun Sinha's profile image

Varun Sinha on 15 Nov 2019 04:01:52

Assume for sake of example, 5 organizations operate in the same market and buy/sell to one another so they store information about one another. A buys from B so B is stored in A's data, etc. as a seller so they can figure out their balances with one another.

Data sharing is manual as usual at first but power bi that comes bundled free/relatively cheap allows each organization to organize their reports and get automated information for sharing internally and externally without much effort. Unfortunately, the format of the reports, etc still requires extra steps and manual work defeating the purpose of going electronic.

Organization can setup data flow that external user can access but this is cumbersome as organizations don't want to reveal all data and it will require multiple data flows/workspaces to be maintained which makes it difficult to scale.

So here's the idea if possible: since each organization stores data about one another, why can't we subset the data model accordingly and make it available as a data source to relevant external organization? can the data model/power bi service not function like a server doing authentication, taking requests, sorting data and sending it back to power bi desktop? in this way, we have secure, updated data in long format available for any organization to format as they wish to link with their internal data, that they can then inject into internal servers for use with any application.