Leslie Welch
Power BI Community Leader | Technical Advisor | Speaker | Mentor
📋 Biography
Leslie Welch is Principal Architect, Data & AI at SHI with over 18 years of experience in automation, data visualization, and strengthening organizations’ knowledge of data. She's worked end-to-end in data, from capture and ETL to database design/engineering to analysis and dashboard design to ML/AI use cases. She has extensive experience in enterprise deployment of Power BI, both as an admin and Power BI architect, and as a trainer and community organizer. She's passionate about data governance, truth-telling in data, and creating collaborative environments between data practitioners and stakeholders. Leslie is co-organizer of Power BI DC and attends and speaks at groups in the DC area, including but not limited to Data Viz DC, Data Science DC, Women Who Code DC, Washington DC Power Platform User Group, and GenAI DC. Leslie was recognized as a 2023 New Power Woman in Tech by DCA Live, and on the RealLIST Engineers 2024 as one of 15 technologists helping the DMV ecosystem grow.
✨ High-Impact Contributions 5
This Monty-Python inspired workshop guided attendees through the mystical (and practical) world of Row-Level Security (RLS), with special attention to the perils and peculiarities of enterprise and government cloud environments. This workshop is designed to provide Power BI developers, ranging from novices to experienced developers, with a solid foundation to implement RLS in Power BI. Workshop attendees learned how to set up RLS start to finish using both dynamic and static approaches, covering setup in both Power BI Desktop the Service. We tackled common challenges, discuss model considerations and how they impact RLS, and untangle the differences between access and security in Power BI. The workshop also addressed governance considerations and some of the unique challenges present within government cloud infrastructures using cross-cloud collaboration.
This Monty-Python inspired workshop guided attendees through the mystical (and practical) world of Row-Level Security (RLS), with special attention to the perils and peculiarities of enterprise and government cloud environments. This workshop is designed to provide Power BI developers, ranging from novices to experienced developers, with a solid foundation to implement RLS in Power BI. Workshop attendees learned how to set up RLS start to finish using both dynamic and static approaches, covering setup in both Power BI Desktop the Service. We tackled common challenges, discuss model considerations and how they impact RLS, and untangle the differences between access and security in Power BI. The workshop also addressed governance considerations and some of the unique challenges present within government cloud infrastructures using cross-cloud collaboration.
This session covers my semantic model ideation process, which I developed to address the lack of feedback loops when developing using the classic waterfall approach. I use this process to help clients create performant secure data models aligned to a star schema and Power BI best practices. Attendees walked away with an understanding of what information they need to start this process, how to work through the steps, and how to validate the proposed model will support their visuals. We worked backwards from what data you need to support the user questions, what Power BI needs to support the visuals, and an overview of the approach to building out your medallion architecture technical requirements for Synapse or Azure Databricks.
Without centralized Dataflows, organizations leveraging Power BI often face data inconsistencies, increased maintenance, and performance issues due to managing individual data connections and transformations across multiple reports. This decentralized approach also hampers governance and leads to redundant efforts, making it challenging to ensure data quality and efficiency across the organization. This talk covered use cases for dataflows, how to orchestrate them for better performance, governance and standardization, and the number one topic folks want to hear about - how to convert queries in existing reports or semantic models to use dataflows without breaking everything. This session is about 25% content to cover fundamental concepts for those who are unfamiliar or self taught, and 75% more advanced concepts around orchestration for enterprise or government level deployments.
Power BI DC is the DC metro area (DC, Maryland, Northern Virginia) user group for Power BI users and the Power BI curious in the DMV.