A Power BI ↔ Databricks integration shipped in 2025 with no Terraform provider, a half-documented REST API, and the kind of resources I am not proud of — but which were in production a year before Microsoft's GA provider arrived. A lesson in realism: ship the ugly thing now, or have nothing for a year.
Some infrastructure-as-code projects are clean. The provider exists, the API is well-documented, the resources line up neatly, the deployment is uneventful. You finish, you move on, you write the article about the elegant abstraction you came up with.
This is not one of those articles.
This is the article about a Power BI ↔ Databricks integration where, when I built it in mid-2025, Microsoft had no Terraform provider for the relevant API surface, the API itself was partially documented in places where it wasn't outright wrong, and the only honest path between "I want a Power BI connection to my Databricks SQL warehouse" and "I have one, in code, repeatable, with rotating credentials" ran through a number of design choices that would make a Hashicorp engineer wince. I'm writing it a year later because the patterns are useful, the limits are instructive, and the workaround — for all its