Power BI Desktop - Unable To Connect

 Just a quick post on an issue I saw a few people run into lately.

Context

I opened a report with a Live connection to a dataset and I was presented with the error below:

We encountered an error while trying to connect.

Details: "Looks like we're unable to access the dataset. Please contact the owner of the dataset."

Clicking Edit gets you the following dialogue, which might already give you a clue what's happening,

Solution

The answer here is actually really simple, if you know it! 😆 

You have to login to Power BI Desktop with the right account. I was currently logged in with my Powerdobs account, while this was a customer report.

So clicking Edit gave me the datasets in the Powerdobs tenant to connect to, which quickly led me to the conclusion I was logged in with the wrong account.

So to solve this, in the top right corner, click on your name/picture and click Sign in with a different account.

Open the report again and it should connect immediately!

Everyone happy :-)

SSMS Error when refreshing a Power BI Table: Paramter name already exists

2 weeks ago I talked about A No-Code Method to Refresh One Table From a Power BI Dataset in the Service. I recently ran into an error using this method, so I thought it was worth sharing this error, and the solution 😀, with you.

TL;DR

Don't use the initial catalog when you're connecting to a Power BI dataset with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

If you want to now more details about the exact problem and solution, please read on below.

Problem

In my previous post I mentioned:

"With some tools it might be necessary to also provide the Initial Catalog (the dataset to connect to in your workspace). The datasets in your workspace will eventually show as databases under your AS-server:"

I did specifically say some tools, and might. 😁

So, to be even more specific, when using SSMS ánd the option for initial catalog, you run into the below error message:

I tried a few things before I got asked for some (external) help. A little bit of context around the problem:

• Note that the message itself also has a typo in it (paramter 😂).
• It happens to every table in every dataset (I tried so far) in this workspace. I tried another workspace and that refreshed fine from the UI.
• A colleague is getting the same error message in the UI for this particular workspace.
• Looking at the error I checked if there are params called name in the datasets, but there aren't.
• It's a test workspace in a deployment pipeline.

Solution

Luckily the solution is very simple! 

• Don't use the Initial Catalog option in combination with SSMS, leave it at <default>
• Or, if for any reason you need the above option selected, install SSMS 19 Preview 4
• This preview version is a side-by-side installation, so it installs next to SSMS 18.x

I hope this helped you if you encountered the same problem.