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Power BI

Power BI cannot use the SoftClient4ES JDBC driver, and the blocker is on Power BI’s side.

Power Query — the data layer behind Power BI Desktop — has no JDBC connector. Its generic, protocol-level connectors are ODBC and OData Feed. There is nothing to point at a JDBC driver JAR, and Power Query’s connector reference lists no bridge product that would route one through ODBC.

(Checked against Microsoft’s Power Query connector reference, 2026-09-01.)

If you have found instructions for adding SoftClient4ES to Power BI through a generic JDBC connector, or through a bridge that routes JDBC over ODBC, they cannot work: there is no such connector to configure, and the connector reference lists no such bridge.

The one candidate, and why we call it unproven

SoftClient4ES also speaks Arrow Flight SQL (grpc://host:32010), and a generic Arrow Flight SQL ODBC driver would in principle give Power BI a path — ODBC is a connector Power Query really does have.

The only such driver we are aware of is Dremio’s Arrow Flight SQL ODBC driver, and we label this path unproven for three specific reasons:

  • Nobody has run it against SoftClient4ES. We have not connected Power BI to SoftClient4ES by any route.
  • Dremio documents the driver as connecting to Dremio. Using it against a third-party Flight SQL server is an inference, not a documented guarantee.
  • Platform restrictions. Dremio publishes the driver for “Linux: RedHat/CentOS”, “Windows 10 and later” and “macOS (Intel processors only)”, and states it is “not supported on Apple Silicon M1, M2, and M3 processors”. (Dremio’s driver documentation, checked 2026-08-31.) Power BI Desktop is Windows-only in any case.

We are not publishing steps for it, because steps imply a supported flow. If you try it, we would like to hear how it went.

What works today

  • Apache Superset — dashboards and SQL Lab over Arrow Flight SQL, dedicated dialect.
  • Tableau — connect and browse your indices, over the JDBC driver.
  • Grafana — dashboards over Arrow Flight SQL.
  • DBeaver — SQL exploration over JDBC or Arrow Flight SQL.

Superset, DBeaver and Grafana run the cross-index JOIN Elasticsearch cannot do natively — see the Cross-Index JOIN walkthrough. Each of them lets you control the statement that is sent, which is what that query needs.

Could this change?

A verified generic Arrow Flight SQL ODBC path would close it, and so would a Power Query connector for SoftClient4ES. Both are work someone has to do; neither is unlocked by a licence. If Power BI is a requirement for your evaluation — or if you have run the ODBC route yourself — open an issue.

License

The JDBC driver and the Arrow Flight SQL server are licensed under the Elastic License 2.0 — free to use, not open source.