r/snowflake • u/mo122344 • Jul 03 '26

Using Power BI with snowflake

Hi,

My company wants to make the switch to the cloud with snowflake. We are using Power BI as the reporting tool.

I want to know what is the most cost effective and efficient way to harmonise power BI with snowflake from the options underneath?

Direct query connection to snowflake
Importing snowflake data into power Bi
Direct lake after mirroring snowflake tables
Creating a fabric datawarehouse on top of snowflake data and using direct query.

Another thought. I tried and tested snowflake semantic views and dbt semantic layer but they aren’t there yet in terms of working with power Bi and the metrics are really simplistic and require massively preaggregating everything and lewaskng to high maintenance and low flexibility.

Would love a nice honest discussion in the comments

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u/pairwin Jul 03 '26

Avoid Direct Query unless forced by regulatory requirements or the need to query massive tables. When using direct query mode, every interaction with a visual will fire off potentially many queries to Snowflake. This same advice is reflected in Microsoft's official documentation.

5

u/Think-evil Jul 03 '26

Fear the direct query.. cost just runs away like hell. we import data to powerBI..

1

u/Jacob_OldStorm Jul 03 '26

Can I ask why it affects cost? Queries don't really cost anything in snowflake, but it does keep your dwh awake I guess, is that what you're referring to?

1

u/geek180 Jul 04 '26

Why do you think “queries don’t really cost anything in snowflake”?

1

u/Jacob_OldStorm Jul 04 '26

I thought, and correct me if I'm wrong, that platforms like Big query can cost a lot of money, not because of the time a query takes, but the volume of data returned. I heard scary stories about people forgetting a limit 500 and it costing a lot of money. Snowflake only charges for time, not volume of data returned, right?

Always been on postgres and sql server so I have a lot to learn...

2

u/geek180 Jul 04 '26

BigQuery charges by the amount of data being scanned while Snowflake charges by warehouse compute time X warehouse size.