R, Power Query and msmdsrv.exe port number

The quest to fetch the details of the ever evasive $Embedded$ connection to the local tabular data model has always interested the Power BI community. There are numerous tips on how to obtain the details involving either shell or PowerShell scripts or even V..B..A…

I want to share with you an approach that is based on using R.Execute() in Power Query, and has the advantage of not implying a dependency outside the Power BI environment. This is a re-iteration of a pattern that I’ve already mentioned in one of my previous posts, which explained hot to use R to get STDOUT as a data source in Power Query.

In the R script I use, the function executes system commands and . Because I need to output the results of these commands into data frames, I also use the function in order to parse the fixed delimited output of STDOUT.

Already in the Power Query world, I transform the two data frames msmdsrv and ports via function formatTable, which trims the table contents and promotes the headers. Then I match/join the two tables on [PID] and parse the contents of column [Local Address] to get the desired port number. Here is the whole script :

https://gist.github.com/Hugoberry/9756bd6fd3a6225d5332d4c1d3e99e83

If you prefer keeping all the filtering logic inside the R script, here is my take on how to do it:

As a final note I wanted to add that there is actually a way of connecting to the embedded tabular data model which doesn’t require any dependencies. Try the command:

= AnalysisServices.Databases("*")

Unfortunately it uses the same connection context as the live connection so you’ll get an exception like:

Microsoft.Mashup.Evaluator.Interface.ErrorException: Connections to the server context that is currently active are not supported.

Which is not very practical.

Originally published at http://querypower.com on March 13, 2017.