Connect Power BI

This guide is for an admin or IT contact connecting Power BI Desktop to your MaxTrax data — it’s not a screen inside the MaxTrax app itself.

Before you start

Power BI Desktop, and an Entra (Azure AD) account your organization has authorized against the reporting views.
Your project’s Azure SQL server name and database name — get these from your admin/IT contact.

Connect

In Power BI Desktop, connect to Azure SQL Database using your server and database names.
Sign in with your Entra account (OAuth2) — there’s no SQL username/password for this.
In the navigator, use only tables under the reporting schema (reporting.vw_*). These are purpose-built reporting views — a separate powerbi_reader role can read only this schema, not your raw operational tables.
Set the storage mode to Import, not DirectQuery. The database can pause when idle to save cost, and DirectQuery would defeat that.

No on-premises data gateway is needed for the default setup. Your IT contact will tell you if your organization instead requires a private network connection.

Set a refresh schedule

Schedule a small number of refreshes per day — two to four is typical — rather than continuous refresh. Refreshing much more often works against the database’s ability to pause when idle, which is where the cost savings come from.

What’s in the reporting views

The reporting schema includes per-entity views (welds, ISOs, test packages, inspections, film intervals, welders, welder lots, procedures, projects, documents, the audit log) plus a set of pre-aggregated views for common reporting cuts. All of them exclude internal sync bookkeeping columns and already-deleted records.