Objective
I'm storing data as Delta Lake format at ADLS gen2. Also they are available through Hive catalog. It's important to notice that we're currently using PowerBI, but in future we may switch to Excel over AAS.
Question
What is the best way (or hack) to connect AAS to my ADLS gen2 data in Delta Lake format?
The issue
There are no Databricks/Hive among AAS supported sources. AAS supports ADLS gen2 through Blob connector, but AFAIK, it doesn't support Delta Lake format, only parquet.
Possible solution
From this article I see that the issue may be potentially solved with PowerBI on-premise API gateway:
One example is the integration between Azure Analysis Services (AAS) and Databricks; Power BI has a native connector to Databricks, but this connector hasn’t yet made it to AAS. To compensate for this, we had to deploy a Virtual Machine with the Power BI Data Gateway and install Spark drivers in order to make the connection to Databricks from AAS. This wasn’t a show stopper, but we’ll be happy when AAS has a more native Databricks connection.
The issue with this solution is that we're planning to stop using PowerBI. I don't quite understand how it works, what PBI license and implementation/maintenance efforts it requires. Could you please provide deeper insight on how it'll work?
UPD, 26 Dec 2020
Now, when Azure Synapse Analytics is GA, it has full support of SQL on-demand. That means that serverless Synapse may theoretically be used as a glue between AAS and Delta Lake. See "Direct Query Databricks' Delta Lake from Azure Synapse".
In the same time, is that possible to query Databricks Catalog (internal/external) from Synapse on-demand using ODBC? Synapse supports ODBC as external source.