A reliable Fabric platform delivering real-time insight and client-facing analytics — built without adding load to the production systems it replaced.
Seven moves took billing and usage reporting from a strained SQL environment to a governed Fabric platform — and out to the client's own customers. Follow the pipe.
Scroll to run the migrationThe on-prem SQL environment carried heavy billing and usage reports for internal teams and external customers alike. Over time that workload placed significant strain on aging infrastructure, and reporting turned slow and unpredictable.
Billing and usage reports ran against the same estate as operations. Refresh times grew, performance drifted.
Reporting required significant developer involvement every cycle, and there was no scalable foundation for customer-facing analytics — nor a clean way to prepare data for billing accuracy and usage-based insight.
Every cycle drew on developer time, and none of it could scale to customers.
Analytical workloads moved into Microsoft Fabric — on-prem SQL ingested and transformed in the cloud rather than against production, shifting reporting load fully off the legacy estate.
Transformation moved to Fabric, so production no longer pays for reporting.
The environment was re-architected around our STEAM framework: a scalable medallion architecture on Azure Data Lake, designed to carry billing, usage, and operational insight side by side — and to expand.
Layered by design, so billing, usage, and operational insight scale together.
Joins, business rules, and usage calculations were consolidated into one centralized semantic model instead of living inside individual reports — so billing figures are defined once and every dashboard agrees.
Logic lives in the model, not in the reports. Every dashboard agrees by construction.
Transparency was built in — pipeline logging, lineage, and run statistics, plus operational alerting on pipeline health, alongside best practices for governance, validation, and cost efficiency.
Pipeline health is visible, and the team is told before anyone else notices.
The reporting layer was rebuilt as client-facing Power BI dashboards — performant, reliable, and secure — replacing manual extracts and the developer workload behind them.
Reporting became a product the client could put in front of its own customers.
We engaged Dataracity to lead the design and recommendation phase of one of our client's enterprise data architecture projects on the Microsoft platform. From the outset their expertise was evident — they introduced us to Microsoft Fabric and provided a robust framework rooted in industry best practices. Beyond high-level strategy, they delivered tangible assets including detailed system architecture diagrams, data flow charts, and comprehensive price modeling. Their technical execution is just as impressive as their strategic planning. I highly recommend Dataracity for any organisation looking to modernise their data stack with precision and clarity.
Shelly JantzenFounder · E2 ConsultingA small delivery team, named and accountable from kickoff to go-live.
Luke Matthews
Co-Founder, Head of Project Delivery & Data Architecture
Amanda Buthelezi
Co-Founder, Project Lead (BI & Data Strategy)
Bring us your source systems and the reports that hurt. We'll map the Fabric architecture, the semantic model, and the path to client-facing analytics in one conversation.
