Love Drillthrough in Power BI? Power up the Data Underneath

by Billy Allocca | June 6, 2025

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Drillthrough is one of Power BI’s most convenient features—right‑click any visual and instantly drop into a focused, detail‑rich report page. But the quality of that experience hinges on the data connected under the hood. Static extracts or stale imports can’t answer the follow‑up questions analysts and executives ask every day.

By delivering live connections to virtually any business system—from ERPs like Sage Intacct and NetSuite to SaaS apps like Salesforce, HubSpot, and even custom databases—CData Connect Cloud ensures that every drillthrough surfaces complete and real‑time answers.

What is drillthrough in Power BI?

Drillthrough lets users jump from a high‑level dashboard element—say, revenue by region—into a dedicated report page filtered for the selected value, for example, the “West” territory. It’s a self‑service way to explore the why behind the what on the fly without rebuilding visuals.

But the feature depends on the underlying dataset being comprehensive enough to expose the fields users want to explore and current enough that the trends uncovered reflect today’s reality

Without both, drillthrough can mislead decision‑makers.

How Connect Cloud delivers live, governed data to Power BI

Connect Cloud makes it easy to not only connect data sources to Power BI but also configure specific datasets in a no/low‑code web UI that appear for use in Power BI like magic. Because the data stays in the source system until it's queried, your dashboards—and every drillthrough interaction—always run on up‑to‑the‑second information.

Behind the scenes, Connect Cloud handles authentication, encryption in transit, and optional row‑level security so that only authorized users can work with sensitive data. Administrators can centrally manage credentials and usage analytics while business users build reports without worrying about data engineering tasks.

Build virtual datasets once, use them everywhere

Need to blend invoices from NetSuite with CRM opportunities from Salesforce? Create a virtual table in Connect Cloud that joins both sources once, then pick the dataset whenever, right from Power BI. The join logic lives in Connect Cloud, so every report page—including drillthrough pages—references the same single source of truth directly from business systems. Change the join or filtering once, and every visualization updates automatically.

Because virtual datasets are reusable endpoints, other BI tools, Python notebooks, or even Excel can share the same live feed, eliminating redundant exports and sync jobs.

Real‑world impact: faster answers, better data

Whether you’re a financial analyst drilling from a cash flow dashboard into transaction‑level details or building dashboards for executives that need to get to the data telling a story, you can power up drillthrough with better data underneath. When data is connected live to Power BI, every hop leads directly to the truth, accelerating decisions and building trust in BI. 

Get started today

Power up your Power BI drillthrough—and every other report interaction—with live, governed data from CData Connect Cloud. Start a free 30‑day trial, connect your first source in minutes, and experience the difference real‑time makes in Power BI.

Explore CData Connect Cloud today

Take a test drive to discover how Connect Cloud excels at streamlining business processes for real-time insights.

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