Connect PowerBI to Heatwave: Oracle’s MySQL Database Service Analytics Engine

Published in

Oracle Developers

3 min readMay 14, 2021

What is Heatwave?

HeatWave is Oracle’s engine designed to enable customers to run analytics on data which is stored in MySQL databases without the need for ETL. This service is built on an innovative, in-memory analytics engine which is architected for scalability and performance and is optimized for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Gen 2 hardware. This results in a very performant solution for SQL analytics at a fraction of the cost compared to other cloud services including AWS Aurora, Redshift, Google Big Query, RDS.

HeatWave is a cloud native service which is exclusively available in Oracle cloud Infrastructure and provides compelling performance and cost for analytic workloads. Organizations using MySQL database for managing their enterprise data can now run analytic queries with HeatWave with significantly better performance, lower cost, not requiring ETL and support for real- time analytics in contrast to other database services like RDS, Google Big Query, Snowflake, Aurora and Redshift. The service can be deployed in a cloud only or in a hybrid environment, and it simplifies management for both transactional and analytic applications.

Check out Oracle’s website to learn more!

Ok, so how do I connect Heatwave to an analytics platform?

In my previous article I showed you how to connect Heatwave to Tableau and here I am going to show you how to connect it to Microsoft Power BI.

Note: At the time of writing, Power BI cloud does not support MySQL.

Prerequisites:
— Get MySQL Heatwave cluster up and running

— Configure MySQL Router to expose MySQL Database Service on a Public IP

— Sign up for an Oracle Cloud Trial Account + Always Free services

Check out my article on how to configure MySQL Router!

Step 1: Install MySQL Connector for Windows

Download from here MySQL Connector for Windows and install it on your machine.

Step 2: From the connection page select Database and MySQL as shown in the image below.

Step 3: Provide MySQL credentials. As Public IP you should use the Public Ip of the machine where you installed MySQL Router.

Step 4: As the last step you need to insert the database credentials and click connect!

I am Roberto Di Bella, Data Scientist Advocate at Oracle. Helping data scientists, developers and companies be successful on Oracle Cloud.
Feel free to connect on LinkedIn.