Power BI

I contracted for the WCG for a few years via a company called QLC.

I was tasked to write a report using Power BI talking to an Oracle database for "Diarrhea Under 5's", something the Western Cape Government were/are concerned about. I had never used Power BI before this.

I wrote the report and dashboard in a month including learning DAX, Power BI's programming language, because there were calculations I wanted to do that weren't available in Power BI. I included a bubble diagram on a map of the Western Cape and I allowed users to slice the data according to various criteria.

A month after getting the project I presented it at our monthly department meeting and I was immediately removed from the project. I later discovered that 3 developers had spent 3 months working on the project, and they couldn't connect directly to Oracle (they needed to use an old driver!) and they were ETL'ing (Extract Transform Load - ie copying data between databases) the data they needed from Oracle to SQL-Server. They were also trying to do too much in PowerBI, whereas I had created the required Star Architecture and Stored Procedures in Oracle, so most of the programming and data architecture was in Oracle, making the PowerBI client requirements much simpler.

Being able to see the big picture and not seeing the programming language or stack as an obstacle has helped me many times. Also not thinking that something is impossible has also helped me in my career.

I always feel that clients are missing out when they don't ask me how I do things. My philosophy is to always help my clients and colleagues work without me, and I've found that the more I do this, the more my clients ask me to do.