10 posts tagged with "ed-fi-api"

Overview​

The Ed‑Fi Data Management Service (DMS) is evolving toward a relational backend, shaped by community feedback and real‑world implementation experience. Building on the proven Ed‑Fi ODS/API foundation, DMS modernizes the storage layer to address long‑standing operational challenges—such as wide composite keys and complex joins—through targeted structural changes.

By prioritizing a relational backend, DMS preserves the core strengths of the ODS: predictable schemas, strong referential integrity, and compatibility with relational tooling. The result is a service that feels familiar to teams with ODS experience and lowers the cognitive and migration cost of adoption.

What This Means for Implementers​

If you work directly with the ODS database today, DMS's data store will feel familiar, but with important structural differences:

• You still work with the same Ed‑Fi entities and natural keys
• Joins are simpler and narrower due to surrogate keys
• Person identity is clearer and no longer mediated by ODS-only integers
• Optional document caching can accelerate API reads

The sections below explain why these changes exist and how they affect database design and operations.

This post is written for database administrators, backend developers, data engineers, and solution architects who work with the Ed‑Fi ODS/API at the database level and are evaluating or planning a transition to DMS. Familiarity with the ODS schema and relational database concepts is assumed.

We’re excited to announce the 0.7 release milestone for the Ed-Fi Data Management Service (DMS).This release focuses on multi-tenancy foundations, operational cost optimizations, and improved performance for scalable deployments.

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.

We’re thrilled to announce the Release Candidate 1 / v0.6.0 release milestone for the Ed-Fi Data Management Service (DMS). This release introduces Swagger UI, template databases, and completes critical end-to-end and compatibility testing. It also lays the groundwork for smoother integration and a better developer experience.

We’re excited to announce the 0.5 release milestone for the Ed-Fi Data Management Service (DMS), marking another step forward on our path toward the upcoming Release Candidate 1. This release delivers key features to support authorization, extensibility, and interoperability.

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.

What's Changed​

The fourth milestone on our journey to a production-ready release of the Data Management Service (DMS) introduces Configuration Management Service backed by configuration data store, namespace-based authorization, and Keycloak integration as the identity provider.

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.