We had so much fun at Virtual Fox Fest 2020 that we've decided to do more online conferences. They won't all be three-day events; in fact, the next one (Thursday, May 6, 2021) is a one-day event. However, it'll still have the same great features everyone loves about VFF: great speakers delivering great sessions, live chatting during presentations, and getting to hang out virtually with new and old friends. This event will feature classic sessions from Southwest Fox, updated for 2021. Registration is available now so sign up today!

We're still discussing whether to hold Southwest Fox in Arizona this fall. We expect to announce our plans for a fall conference by the end of March.

Hi Doug,

Looking forward to Virtual Fox Fest 2021.

I wish this was a talk proposal, but I don't have a solution to offer. It is more an appeal to see if other VFP developers may want to collaborate in solving this problem.

Power BI is a powerful application for data visualization. Surely many VFP developers would like to use it to present their application's data.

When connecting Power BI to data you can import the whole database or use "direct query" which is far better for large databases. Unfortunately, Power BI only accepts for "direct query" a limited number for formats. One of the accepted formats is ODBC. While the VFP ODBC driver would seem to be the way for us to go, there are other limitations, for example if the data is in a remote machine or if your data is not in the exactly appropriate VFP DBC format, for example if your data is in free tables as is ours.

There are a couple of enormously expensive commercial solutions that may help in these cases.

We are looking to overcome these limitations by finding or creating a "verbatim passthrough" ODBC driver with which to provide Power BI access to our application's data. The "verbatim passthrough" ODBC driver would do exactly that, pass requests and responses back and forth exactly as received.

It would be the responsibility of the next in line program to provide the responses that Power BI expects. Among these are providing the database schema and query results in the expected formats.

Would you be so kind as to pass this question among Virtual Fox Fest presenters? Maybe one of them may point to solution.

Thanks,

Alex

Hi Alex.

Why not do a query from your data into a VFP free table and then have Power BI use the VFP ODBC driver to read from that table?

Doug