Experience / Case Studies

Case Study: Wichita Public Schools Modernizing School Analytics on Azure

While keeping student and educator data secure

About Wichita Public Schools

Wichita Public Schools

Wichita Public Schools provides K-12 public education in Wichita, Kansas.

Customer Need / Business Driver

  • Move analytics from Cognos to a more modern architecture
  • Demonstrate that cloud-based BI could meet the district’s strict security requirements
  • Connect from its current on-premise sources to Power BI on Azure

Data Sources

  • PeopleSoft on Oracle DB
  • IPSP, a student and grading system running on SQL Server
  • Synergy running on SQL Server
  • 2 CSV and 2 Excel files

Azure Synapse Analytics

Wichita Public Schools – Azure Synapse Analytics -1

What KPI and Microsoft Delivered

  • This project was executed in partnership with the Microsoft team
  • Using Azure Data Factory, data pulled into Parquet files on an Azure data lake
    • 2 on-premise SQL Services sources, pulling 12 tables from one source and 100 from another
    • 20 PeopleSoft tables
    • 2 CSV files
    • 2 Excel files
  • Connected Azure Data Lake to serverless Synapse with ADF
  • A parameterized data pipeline
  • Reports in Power BI that verified data was being pulled properly
  • Power BI reports mimicking Cognos paginated reports
  • Security linking Wichita Public Schools’ Active Directory to Power BI users set up in Azure
  • Best practices for using serverless Synapse, including partitioning, schema inference, and appropriate data types
  • Knowledge transfer

Benefits to the school system

  • Modelled blended HR data, IPSP data, and data from the Synergy Education Platform with Excel and CSV files to discover new insights into teacher and school performance
  • Improved productivity from Power BI compared to Cognos
  • Integrated automated security model
  • Best practices on data engineering, Synapse architecture and security incorporated without a lot of trial and error

Tags: Case Study, Power BI, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, PeopleSoft ERP, Will Hutchinson



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