Enterprise Power BI platform engineering
Taking ownership of the Power BI environment for an operation with hundreds of users, and fixing access, performance and deployment reliability.
The corporate Power BI environment had grown faster than its governance. Access permissions, refresh times and model complexity were turning into operational problems, and a growing user base was compounding each of them.
The platform had to support an expanding user base without access control becoming manual work, without refresh delaying the read of the data, and without every new model raising the maintenance cost of the whole estate.
- Administration of workspaces, gateways and deployment pipelines
- Dynamic RLS in DAX, with access control centralised through SQL views
- Query folding and SQL optimisation across more than 20 semantic models
- Automated KPI alerts using Power BI Service and Power Automate
- Standardisation of star schema, calendar, grain and report UX
- Lineage and model documentation using DAX Studio
The environment came to support more than 300 users, and the optimisation work cut refresh time by roughly 35% across more than 20 semantic models. Access control stopped being a manual task per report and became derived from a single source.
Have an operational problem to solve?
Describe the process that needs to evolve, or the decision your company needs data to support. We come back with an initial read and the next steps.