Sharing Data Between Organisations With Azure Data Share

If you’ve ever built a BI solution it’s likely you will have had to integrate third party data, and if that’s the case you will know how painful it often is to get your hands on that data. Badly designed portals you have to log into every week to download the data, CSV files emailed to you, APIs with complex authentication – it’s usually an unreliable, slow and manual process. This is why I was interested to read about a new Azure service that previewed this week called Azure Data Share that aims to provide a simple and secure way to share data between organisations.

You can read the announcement blog post here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-preview-of-azure-data-share/

…read the documentation here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-share/

…and watch an introductory video here:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/Share-data-simply-and-securely-using-Azure-Data-Share

What could this be used for in Power BI? Well, just for fun I uploaded the contents of a Common Data Model folder to a storage account in one Azure account and used Azure Data Share to copy that folder into a storage account in another Azure account. In the destination the data was stored in Azure Data Lake Gen2 storage, so I was able to attach the CDM folder as a dataflow in Power BI. It took a lot of trial-and-error on my part to get the permissions on the various storage accounts working properly (I’m not an expert on this…) but it worked. This proves that third-party data can be exposed directly inside Power BI as a dataflow using Azure Data Share, which I think is pretty darned cool. If you’re a company that sells data and you want your customers to be able to consume that data easily in Power BI, I think this might be a good way to do it.