There are two methods to connect a third-party business intelligence tool, such as Power BI, to Access Data Engine.
First, you need to be on Access Evo Professional Edition to enable the use of Data Streams and also get the ability to create an API App.
Data Streams
The first method is Data Streams. Data Streams allows you to copy data from any table or view, to external destinations such as FTP/SFTP servers, databases or web clients.
By copying data to an external destination, you can then use the methods available in your third-party BI tool to get data.
Example: From Data Engine set up a data stream to copy data to a web service. You can then select the data to stream. Data Engine then generates an URL, which returns the data when you call it. You can protect the URL through various methods of authentication. Using Power BI get data from web and complete the relevant fields using the configuration set in Data Engine.
API app
Creating an API app allows you to integrate with Access Data Engine’s REST API. The API allows data to fetch from Data Engine.
Similar to the first method, you can utilize the third-party BI tool’s supported methods of getting data, to integrate with the Access Data Engine API.
The Access Data Engine API supports pagination and filtering.
Note: Both methods require you to have an understanding and experience of using web services. If you don't have this knowledge, we encourage you to speak to your account manager to discuss options.
Neither method is suitable for fetching large amounts of data at a time. When dealing with large amounts of data, we recommend you use Access Data Engine to aggregate the data before data fetches from a third-party BI tool.
The Data Stream method is simpler to implement, however doesn’t provide the flexibility that creating an API App provides.