Using Microsoft Power BI With PostgreSQL

| databases | microsoft |

Microsoft Power BI is an advanced business intelligence suite that allows you to perform robust data analysis from a variety of different data sources. One common data source is PostgreSQL. Although Microsoft PowerBI does support PostgreSQL, getting started can be a bit tricky because there is no great documentation.

If you try to connect to PostgreSQL with a fresh installation of PowerBI you will receive the following error message.

https://www.postgresql.org/
This connector requires one or more additional components to be installed before it can be used.
If you click on the Learn more link, it will take you to the GitHub repository for the Npgsql library, which is a windows driver for Postgres.

If you download the latest .msi file and run through the default installation, you will continue to receive the same error message in Power BI. In order to get this to work you must select the Npgsql GAC Installation option as shown in the screenshot below.

Npgsql GAC Installation Option

Once you have installed the Npgsql GAC Installation, you can restart Microsoft Power BI and you should now be able to connect to a PostgreSQL database as a data source.

[caption id=“attachment_682” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]PostgreSQL connection window in Microsoft Power BI PostgreSQL connection window in Microsoft Power BI[/caption]

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