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Analytics Middle Tier Transitioning to Ed-Fi Exchange in 2025

Oct 11, 2023

What is Happening​

The next planned release of Analytics Middle Tier (AMT), version 4.1, will be the last fully supported release. From that point, it will be in maintenance mode until June, 2025. While in maintenance mode, new patch releases will occur for critical bugs and security updates. In 2025, AMT will move to the Ed-Fi Exchange and the source repository will be set into archive, signaling that the application support has formally ended.

Why?​

Analytics Middle Tier was designed to help report and application builders more quickly develop solutions that directly access an ODS database. This is a pattern that the Ed-Fi Alliance no longer encourages, for several reasons:

  1. While the views in AMT are useful and achieve their objective, they create a de facto alternate data model and API (albeit, a databaseAPI rather than a webAPI). The Ed-Fi Alliance is dedicated to promoting a single Data Standard and its related data model, via the web-based Ed-Fi API.
  2. Direct database usage for reporting often create resource contention that can be harmful to transactional systems.
  3. With the growth of large-scale deployments, where another organization manages the Ed-Fi API on behalf of an LEA, fewer and fewer organizations continue to have the right network access and permissions for direct database applications.

Next Steps for Users​

  • No action required at this time.
  • Watch for a release announcement about Analytics Middle Tier 4.1, which will work with .NET 8.
  • Anyone wishing to continue using Analytics Middle Tier from 2025 and beyond is welcome to create a fork of the source code repository.