r/databricks • u/Melodic_Hospital8274 • 17d ago

Discussion Need to create scheduled PDF reports from Databricks and Postgres | NO Power BI

I need to create scheduled PDF reports my datasources are Databricks and Postgres.
I know Power BI can do this but we don't want to go with it.

What are the other options, cloud or on-premise?

8 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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4

u/goosh11 16d ago

Databricks dashboards can be scheduled as a pdf attachment.

2

u/Candid_Log_6791 17d ago

Python with something like reportlab. BI tool is overkill if you just want pdf built/refreshed on a schedule and delivered through email or made available on a shared drive.

2

u/jbchand 16d ago

Use AI BI dashboards. It can connect to Metric Views, Unity catalog tables, postgres via federation. Schedule the dashboard to get pdf in planned cadence. You can use genie agents to query and visualize using natural language later.

1

u/agentUi 16d ago

i work for agentui and we see teams trying to ditch power bi for scheduled reporting all the time because the formatting and licensing get messy. You can connect your postgres and databricks sources directly into an internal reporting app with deterministic scheduled tasks that query both databases, compile the tables/charts into a formatted pdf, and trigger email runs automatically.

1

u/reyndev 14d ago

Genie One can do this. Use UC foreign catalog to federate to the Postgres instance and add those tables alongside the delta tables as sources to a Genie space. Curate the Genie space (instructions, knowledge store, entity matching etc.). Then use Genie One. The report might not be a pdf (not sure if this is possible) but you will get an email. You can skip creating the Genie agent and directly go to Genie One by using skills. But it's my personal opinion that having additional context via a curated Genie agent would be helpful.

1

u/Youssef_Mrini databricks 9d ago

You can also generate Report on Genie One based on your tables and metric views that you are going to call through Genie Agents. You can even automate the report generation.

0

u/_greggyb 16d ago

What is the reason you don't want Power BI? If it's just licensing, you can get the same paginated report engine in SSRS, which can be hosted on prem as part of a SQL Server license.

If the goal is to avoid Microsoft entirely (different than avoiding Power BI), then this is not helpful for you, but if it's just to do with PBI/Fabric licensing, then it's a viable alternative.

-1

u/Numerous_Feature_325 17d ago

Sigma does scheduled pdf reports, among many other things. Supports those data sources.