2025 WA GIS Conference

The Forest Practices Division of the Washington State Department of Natural Resources issue permits for forest practices on private and state forest land. Our office staff, who process permits on a tight deadline and report out stats, needed a way to quickly and easily query our Oracle database data when they had no direct access and no SQL experience. They also had no ArcGIS Online access or experience. We pursued using Power BI to create a user-friendly dashboard with user-controlled filters, but hit a brick wall when it was discovered that our agency had no budget for a data gateway. In other words, we had no way to connect our behind-the-firewall Oracle data to the cloud where Power BI could ingest it. What we did have was an SDE/ArcGIS Enterprise, allowing us to access our Oracle data in ArcGIS Portal. So, after learning a little about m-code and a lot about pagination, we were able to connect our Portal feature services to Power BI via REST API, allowing us to create custom dashboards and reports that we could then embed in Microsoft Teams for easy viewing and access for all staff members at no additional cost to our divison.