Introduction
Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows you to connect to different data sources and visualize data in a meaningful way. One popular data source that Power BI can connect to is SQL Server. I'll walk you through the steps to connect Power BI to a SQL Server database in this article.
Step 1. Open Power BI Desktop.
Step 2. In the Home tab, click "Get Data" to start the data source connection process.
Step 3. In the "Get Data" window, select "SQL Server" from the list of data sources.
Step 4. Enter the server name and database name in the respective fields. Select data connectivity mode, whether you want to import the data or connect by Direct Query. You can also use advanced settings (Optional). Click ‘OK’.
![SQL Server to Power BI]()
Step 5. Choose the authentication method for your SQL Server connection. You can use Windows authentication or SQL Server authentication.
Step 6. Configure the privacy levels for your data. Power BI allows you to control the level of data privacy for your data sources.
Step 7. Once configuring the connection settings, click "Load" to load the data into Power BI.
Step 8. Now that you've connected to your SQL Server database, you can start building your report. Use the different visualizations available in Power BI to create interactive reports and dashboards.
Conclusion
This article taught us how to connect SQL Server to Power BI. That's it! Following these steps, you can easily connect to a SQL Server database in Power BI and start visualizing your data. I think this article is useful to you.