Power BI to Moodle - Live Connection

[DB2023]

Hello Everyone, 

I have a question please about PowerBI and Moodle - namely, is it possible (and if so then how) to connect PowerBI to a live data source in Moodle? 
I work for a University and some work that is coming up I think will entail gaining insights on student progression - so the connection would need to be from PowerBI to the activity log in Moodle (where we can see each student per module, tasks completed, frequency of page visits etc). Any help would be much appreciated - thank you in advance for your time. 

[v-pnaroju-msft]

Hi DB2023,

Thank you for the update.

Should you have any further queries, kindly feel free to contact the Microsoft Fabric community.

Thank you.

[v-pnaroju-msft]

Hi DB2023,

We would like to follow up and see whether the details we shared have resolved your problem.
If you need any more assistance, please feel free to connect with the Microsoft Fabric community.

Thank you.

[v-pnaroju-msft]

Thankyou, @FBergamaschi, for your response.

Hi DB2023,

We appreciate your enquiry via the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum.

Based on my understanding, in Power BI a Live connection applies only when a report is connected directly to a published Power BI dataset. Moodle logs are stored in the underlying database or exported as files, therefore, a direct Live connection is not possible.

Please consider the following approaches, which may help to resolve the issue:

1. Moodle stores logs in tables. If you have access to the underlying database (like PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQL Server), create a read-only view containing the required fields and use the appropriate Power BI connector ( for example:PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQL Server). For on-premises databases, configure an On-premises Data Gateway. Use Import with Incremental Refresh for large historical datasets, or DirectQuery for near real-time access bearing in mind the limitations of DirectQuery.
2. Moodle provides web service APIs. You can extract data using Power Automate or Azure Data Factory and store it in Azure SQL or a data lake, and then connect that storage to Power BI.

We hope the information provided helps to resolve your issue. Should you have any further queries, please feel free to contact the Microsoft Fabric Community.

Thank you.

[DB2023]

Hi @v-pnaroju-msft and @FBergamaschi , thank you both so much for getting back to me. 

This project is still in it's infancy and I don't even know if it is going to go ahead - I was just curious as to whether or not in principle it is possible. Thank you both for your suggestions - over the next few months I'm hoping to reach out to IT and see if we can get something workable set up. Thanks"! 

[FBergamaschi]

Hi @DB2023,

live connection is available only for Power BI Semantic models published on the Power BI Service

DirectQuery might be what you are looking for but that is available only for a few databases and not to flat files like a log file.

If you load the log file data inot a database table (SQL server for example), through some kind of script, yes you could connect in DirectQuery to that database

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