To promote CI/CD for Analysis Services tabular models (SSAS, Azure AS or Power BI datasets), I always recommend people to use Tabular Editor with Azure DevOps. One popular feature of Tabular Editor's CLI, is that it can perform a schema check, in which Tabular Editor connects to the data source defined within the tabular model, in order to validate the partition queries against the actual columns specified in the model metadata.
Microsoft recommends the use of the MSOLEDBSQL provider (1,2) for SQL Server-based data sources. Unfortunately, this provider is not available on Microsoft-hosted build agents in Azure Pipelines (neither vs2017-win2016 nor windows-2019).
Unfortunately, the installer for MSOLEDBSQL requires admin permission, so I don't think that we can install the driver as part of our pipeline.
One workaround is to use Tabular Editor's scripting functionality to temporarily change the data source to use for example the SQLNCLI provider when performing the schema check. However, it feels like the missing MSOLEDBSQL driver on the build agents is an oversight on Microsoft's part, especially considering that they're recommending the use of this driver for production purposes.
Is there any way we can have the MSOLEDBSQL driver available on a Microsoft-hosted Windows-based build agent?
Virtual Environments repo contains the source used to create the virtual environments for GitHub Actions hosted runners, as well as the VM images of Microsoft-hosted agents used for Azure Pipelines.To file bug reports, or request that tools be added/updated, please open an issue using the appropriate template.
So I think you can open a Tool Request here with the given template, then the team there would consider and check your feedback.
In addition: As temporary workaround you can consider installing one self-hosted agent in your local machine, so that you can run the pipeline with local environment. (With more control to install dependent software needed for your build and deployment)