Stephen A. Fuqua

Overview​

User Story: as an education agency staff member, I want to view the data loaded into the Ed-Fi ODS/API, so that I can compare to my local source of truth and ensure the correct information has been loaded.

Solutions: Use an API client to access the ODS/API, using key/secret credentials issued by the platform host. The ODS/API's Open API files ("swagger.json" metadata) provide documentation of available resources, and there are many robust tools that can read this file to pre-create HTTP requests for you. Bruno is currently my favorite such tool; Postman and Swagger UI are more well-known alternatives.

What about database access as an alternative? And how do these API clients help solve this problem? Read on for more on these topics.

The documentation for Ed-Fi Data Standard 6.0 is now live! Check out What's New in Data Standard 6.0 for full details.

Key Breaking Changes in 6.0​

This release introduces breaking changes, aligned with the Ed-Fi Alliance’s release cadence. Here are the highlights:

The Ed-Fi Alliance continues to advance its mission of enabling interoperability and scalable data solutions for education agencies. At the recent Ed-Fi Alliance Summit 2025, we shared updates from the Ed-Fi Technology Roadmap, highlighted recent releases, and previewed what’s coming in the next few years.

The Ed-Fi Alliance has adopted a cadence of releasing breaking changes to the Ed-Fi Data Standard on alternating years. 2025 is such a year and the next release of the Ed-Fi Data Standard - and consequently the Ed-Fi Resources API - will be labeled version 6.0. With a release date months away in Q4, we are inviting early commentary on the changes made to date, in two domains:

1. Merge the Educator Preparation Data Model (EPDM, fka TPDM) into the core Ed-Fi Data Standard, and expand it to include a new use case around apprenticeships.
2. Enhance the data model to better support student record transfer, particularly for IEP data as a student moves from one school to another.

For more details, including a snapshot of the Open API specification (aka Swagger file), please see RFC 27 - Data Standard 6.0 (Preview 1)

Tech Congress 2025 is just over a month away and Project Tanager Milestone 0.4.0 has been reached. Can you help us show off what it is (or might be) capable of?

Think of this as a call for posters. If you're not familiar with academic conferences and posters... then maybe you can imagine a science fair board. Do something cool, show it off in a few words and some pictures, and you get a few minutes to narrate for your audience. Complete your "poster" before April 17 so that I have time to incorporate it into a slide deck for an April 23 Tech Congress session showing off the Data Management Service in Action.

The gifts arrive early this week: we are excited to announce three important releases: Data Standard 5.2, ODS/API 7.3, and MetaEd 4.5. In semantic versioning these are minor updates (no breaking changes), but they include major new features. Read on for a quick summary.

What's Changed​

This second milestone on our way to a production-ready release of the Data Management Service adds full referential integrity handling to the basic validation support from the first milestone:

Access the code at tag 0.1.0

This first milestone release of the new Ed-Fi Data Management Service provides a PostgreSQL-backed Ed-Fi API with the following features:

The recent Ed-Fi blog post New Cloud-Native Functionality Coming to the Ed-Fi Alliance Technology Suite introduced a piece of software under active development, the Ed-Fi Data Management Service.

Eventually, this software will replace the Ed-Fi ODS/API Platform. Unsurprisingly, a few themes emerged in the questions and conversations at Ed-Fi Tech Congress 2024. We've begun addressing those in a new Frequently Asked Questions page in the Project Tanager repository. And we'll continue adding questions and answers on that page as they come upk.

The Ed-Fi tech team has produced a lot of content over the years. Yet, we continue to face challenges with our documentation. On the one hand, discoverability and awareness seem to be low; on the other, our technical processes for managing the content are at odds with our typical daily workflows.