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Ability to add data to Power BI model from ArcGIS Online service layers and tables through the Power BI Get Data Menu
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Power BI has many out of the box connectors to bring data from external sources (ex. Salesforce) into their data model. It would be helpful if ArcGIS Online (and Enterprise) was one of these options. Often GIS layers are the database of record for data assets in an organization., so they are useful for their tabular data in addition to the spatial aspect. That data then needs to be joined to information from other systems like maintenance and permitting to report information useful to the business. Often Power BI modelers need to add measures based on the data to make create reports.
The ArcGIS For Power BI visual is a great start since it allows data from a model to be joined to GIS data for map visualization. But it prevents incorporating data further upstream, so it can be processed in Power Query or incorporated into measure functions. As for the spatial column aspect, Power BI seems to honor GeoJSON as a data format, it would be helpful if this proposed connector could bring the spatial geometry from the Esri service into a Data model column.
At the 2023 UC Technical Workshop "ArcGIS for Microsoft 365: An Overview", I saw that Esri is trying to accommodate this need by providng a Power Automate template workflow that uses the ArcGIS Power Automate premium connector to read a GIS service, and write it to a csv in One Drive so it can then be imported to a Power BI model. Although this may be better for some user's workflows, it feels like a workaround that requires adding additional data hops. Building a Power BI connector would further development along the same lines to make getting data from ArcGIS into Power BI models quick and easy from a single interface
Matthew Roche at Microsoft has a maxim about where the best place to do data processing should occur in the hops from source data to Power BI model. "Data should be transformed as far upstream as possible, and as far downstream as necessary". If Power BI had a "Get Data from ArcGIS" connector, that would help modelers in Esri shops follow this principle when data. Here's a 20 minute presentation where he talks about it: Roche's Maxim of Data Transformation - SQLBits Presentation
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