Edition № 01 · Forge Notes

The work of turning raw data into decisions that ship.

Ankur Arora — Senior Architect, Data and Analytics, with eighteen years building enterprise analytics platforms across healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. This is where I publish what I learn while doing the work.

Read the journal → About the author

18 Years in BI
& Analytics

500₊ Business users
served

7 Microsoft
certifications

Power BI· Microsoft Fabric· DAX· Snowflake· Databricks· Azure· Semantic Modeling· BI Governance· Power BI· Microsoft Fabric· DAX· Snowflake· Databricks· Azure· Semantic Modeling· BI Governance·

From the Journal

Recent dispatches.

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No. 01

Apr 12, 2026 · 7 min read

The Semantic Model Is the Product

Most BI failures aren't dashboard failures. They're semantic model failures dressed up as dashboard failures. Here's how that mistake actually compounds — and what to do instead.

power-biarchitecturesemantic-modeling

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No. 02

Apr 3, 2026 · 9 min read

Microsoft Fabric Is Not What You Think It Is

After a year of building production workloads on Fabric, I think most of the discourse about it — both the cheerleading and the skepticism — is missing the actual story. Here's what Fabric is really good at, what it isn't, and how to decide.

fabricarchitecturepower-bi

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Selected Work

Things I've built
for serious operators.

All case studies →

Building Admissions 360 — A Behavioral Health Analytics Platform on Microsoft Fabric

Designed and led the implementation of an enterprise admissions analytics platform on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, replacing a fragmented reporting estate with a unified semantic layer serving departments across the admissions journey.

Healthcare 2024 — Present

→ 02

Rationalizing a Sprawling BI Estate — From QlikView Legacy to a Unified Power BI Platform

Led the consolidation of a fragmented BI environment spanning QlikView, legacy Power BI, and direct Snowflake/Databricks queries into a governed Power BI platform with shared semantic models and standardized deployment pipelines.

Retail & CPG 2022 — 2024

→ 03

An Enterprise Semantic Model Serving 500+ Business Users

Designed and governed a multi-domain semantic model framework for a global manufacturing organization, supporting commercial analytics, operational reporting, and self-service consumption by 500+ users across 14 countries.

Manufacturing 2018 — 2023

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