Explore Geographical Relationships in Lakebase Data with Power Map

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Senior Technology Evangelist
Create data visualizations with Lakebase data in Power Map.

The CData ODBC Driver for Lakebase is easy to set up and use with self-service analytics solutions like Power BI: Microsoft Excel provides built-in support for the ODBC standard. This article shows how to load the current Lakebase data into Excel and start generating location-based insights on Lakebase data in Power Map.

Create an ODBC Data Source for Lakebase

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

To connect to Databricks Lakebase, start by setting the following properties:
  • DatabricksInstance: The Databricks instance or server hostname, provided in the format instance-abcdef12-3456-7890-abcd-abcdef123456.database.cloud.databricks.com.
  • Server: The host name or IP address of the server hosting the Lakebase database.
  • Port (optional): The port of the server hosting the Lakebase database, set to 5432 by default.
  • Database (optional): The database to connect to after authenticating to the Lakebase Server, set to the authenticating user's default database by default.

OAuth Client Authentication

To authenicate using OAuth client credentials, you need to configure an OAuth client in your service principal. In short, you need to do the following:

  1. Create and configure a new service principal
  2. Assign permissions to the service principal
  3. Create an OAuth secret for the service principal

For more information, refer to the Setting Up OAuthClient Authentication section in the Help documentation.

OAuth PKCE Authentication

To authenticate using the OAuth code type with PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange), set the following properties:

  • AuthScheme: OAuthPKCE.
  • User: The authenticating user's user ID.

For more information, refer to the Help documentation.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Import Lakebase Data into Excel

You can import data into Power Map either from an Excel spreadsheet or from Power Pivot. For a step-by-step guide to use either method to import Lakebase data, see the "Using the ODBC Driver" section in the help documentation.

Geocode Lakebase Data

After importing the Lakebase data into an Excel spreadsheet or into PowerPivot, you can drag and drop Lakebase entities in Power Map. To open Power Map, click any cell in the spreadsheet and click Insert -> Map.

In the Choose Geography menu, Power Map detects the columns that have geographic information. In the Geography and Map Level menu in the Layer Pane, you can select the columns you want to work with. Power Map then plots the data. A dot represents a record that has this value. When you have selected the geographic columns you want, click Next.

Select Measures and Categories

You can then simply select columns: Measures and categories are automatically detected. The available chart types are Stacked Column, Clustered Column, Bubble, Heat Map, and Region.

Ready to get started?

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Lakebase Icon Lakebase ODBC Driver

The Lakebase ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Lakebase, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Lakebase data like you would a database - read, write, and update Lakebase 0, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.