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Sergei Semenkov
Sergei Semenkov

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Power BI Service on ClickHouse, without an ODBC driver on your gateway

#powerbi #clickhouse #semanticlayer #dataengineering

As of November 2026. You need Power BI Desktop, a Power BI account and a Windows machine for the on-premises data gateway.

Last week Claude built a Power BI report on 182 million flights in ClickHouse. It ran in Power BI Desktop. The next question is the one every BI team asks: can the rest of the team open it in the Power BI Service?

Here's how: publish the same live report through the standard gateway, with nothing ClickHouse-specific installed on it.

Disclosure: I'm the author of eMondrian, the open-source semantic layer used here.

How it works: a semantic model in between

eMondrian sits between Power BI and ClickHouse. It holds the model, with cubes, dimensions and measures such as On-Time Rate defined once. To Power BI it looks like Analysis Services. Power BI connects to it live and sends DAX. eMondrian turns that into SQL for ClickHouse.

For the Service, that means the gateway uses a connection type it already has built in: Analysis Services. There is no ClickHouse driver or custom connector on the gateway. The gateway only needs to reach eMondrian's HTTPS address.

How a query travels from the browser to ClickHouse and back: Power BI Service, the data gateway with its built-in Analysis Services connection, eMondrian, ClickHouse

Official ClickHouse connector Through eMondrian
On the gateway machine ClickHouse ODBC driver Nothing extra: built-in Analysis Services
How Power BI queries DirectQuery: Power BI writes SQL against the tables Live connection to a semantic model
Where measures live In each .pbix Once, in the model; the same in Power BI, Excel and AI agents

What you need

  • A report with a live connection to eMondrian. Use the one from the previous tutorial. Or connect Power BI Desktop yourself: Get data → Analysis Services, server https://demo.emondrian.com/xmla, database OnTime, Connect live.
  • The on-premises data gateway in standard mode (not personal mode), on a Windows machine that can reach the eMondrian address.
  • A Power BI account. On a Free licence you can view your own report in My workspace. To share it with your team, you need Pro or Premium Per User.

I used the public eMondrian demo, so there was no server to install. Its data is read-only: 182 million US flights in ClickHouse.

Step 1. Add the connection to the gateway

Install the gateway and sign in, if you haven't already. Then, in the Power BI Service: Settings → Manage connections and gateways → New → On-premises.

  • Gateway: your gateway
  • Connection type: Analysis Services
  • Server: https://demo.emondrian.com/xmla (or your eMondrian address)
  • Database: OnTime
  • Authentication: Windows, with an account the gateway can use
  • Privacy level: Organizational

The gateway connection: type Analysis Services, server https://demo.emondrian.com/xmla, database OnTime

Save. The gateway needs a Windows account to make the connection; the demo doesn't check it.

Step 2. Publish from Power BI Desktop

Open the report in Desktop and click Publish, then choose a workspace. The Service matches the report to the gateway connection by server and database. If it doesn't, check Semantic model settings → Gateway and cloud connections.

Step 3. Open it in the browser

The report in the Power BI Service: 2025, all carriers

Every visual queries the model live through the gateway. Nothing is imported into Power BI, and there's no scheduled data refresh to set up for the report itself.

I clicked through it and compared each number with a direct MDX query on the server. They matched:

  • 2025: 7,001,619 flights, 76.34% on time, the same as in Desktop and in the Claude dashboard on the same model;
  • carrier DL (Delta) selected: 1,026,332 flights, 79.12%;
  • the tooltip for Delta in September: 87.36%;
  • clicking American (AA) on the carriers bar cross-filters the page: 973,653 flights, 72.70%;
  • cancellation rate by day of week for Delta matches the previous article: Friday 1.73% is the worst day, Wednesday 0.49% the best.

The same report with Delta selected

Speed: the eight-visual page opened in 3.6–4.6 seconds in the Service through the gateway. In Desktop, connected directly, its slowest visual took 1.7–3.6 seconds. Those were warm runs on a shared public demo, so treat them as a rough idea, not a benchmark.

Step 4. Pin it to a dashboard

Pin a few visuals to a dashboard as usual. The tiles show live data and refresh automatically through the same gateway connection. This requires eMondrian 10.0.62 or later.

A dashboard with three pinned tiles

What about Excel?

Analyze in Excel from the Service needs a Pro or PPU licence. I didn't test it.

You don't need the Service for Excel, though. Excel connects to eMondrian directly: Data → Get Data → From Database → From Analysis Services, with the same address. A PivotTable there uses the same model and the same measures as the report.

Doing this on your own data

  1. Run eMondrian Community next to your database: git clone https://github.com/eMondrian/emondrian-community and ./setup.sh. It works with ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, MySQL or any JDBC source.
  2. Describe your cubes and measures, or ask Claude to draft the schema over MCP.
  3. Point the gateway's Analysis Services connection at your eMondrian address and publish.

The Power BI (DAX) module needs a key; a free 30-day evaluation key is at emondrian.com/license.

eMondrian: Demo · GitHub · Docs

Sources:

Have you put ClickHouse behind the Power BI Service? What broke? Leave a comment.

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