About Me

Hi, I’m Martyn.

I’m a Senior Power BI & Microsoft Fabric Consultant based in Wales, with over eight years of experience designing and delivering business intelligence solutions across fintech, wealth management, government, law, mining, telecoms and defence.

My work sits at the intersection of data modelling, analytics engineering and visual design. I specialise in building robust semantic models, optimised DAX solutions, and scalable reporting platforms that organisations can trust — not just dashboards that look good.

I help organisations implement and mature their Power BI and Fabric estates — from data model architecture and performance optimisation through to governance, deployment pipelines and best-practice standards.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn for more of my work and writing.

My Journey into Data

I started my career in IT engineering — building servers, configuring networks and troubleshooting hardware. That hands-on technical foundation gave me a deep appreciation for how systems work under the hood.

From there, I moved into Microsoft Dynamics CRM, where I began working more closely with data. It was during that time, in 2017, that I discovered Power BI — and everything clicked.

Power BI combined three things I genuinely enjoy:

Logical problem solving
Data modelling and optimisation
Clean, intentional visual design

The deeper I went — into DAX, M, SQL, data modelling patterns and performance tuning — the more I realised that business intelligence is far more than visualisation. It’s about building reliable analytical foundations that decision-makers can depend on.

That’s where my focus has remained ever since.

Why "Not Just a Pretty Dashboard"?

Business intelligence is often misunderstood as “making dashboards”. But real BI work goes much deeper:

Designing efficient star schemas
Reducing multi-gigabyte data sets into performant semantic models
Creating reusable measures and calculation logic
Implementing governance and deployment processes
Ensuring accessibility and clarity in reporting

A dashboard is simply the surface layer of a much deeper analytical system.

This blog exists to explore that depth.

I share lessons learned from real projects — modelling approaches, performance improvements, DAX patterns, governance ideas, and practical techniques that save time and reduce technical debt.

If something here helps you build better, more robust analytics, then it’s doing its job.