Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 347

PowerShell DBA Dream dbatools Workshop

Unlock the power of automation and enhance your database management skills in this full-day PowerShell workshop designed for DBAs. This session will equip you with essential skills and streamline your daily operations and reduce manual errors through scripting and automation.

We will start with PowerShell fundamentals before moving into advanced scripting best practices tailored to the needs of SQL Server management. A key highlight of the workshop is our in-depth exploration of the dbatools module—a powerful, community-built toolkit that simplifies SQL Server management tasks. With over 700 cmdlets/functions it is a treasure trove of greatness (in my opinion). This mostly demo session with many real-world examples, you’ll learn how to leverage dbatools to automate tasks such as backups, restores, performance monitoring, and migrations, dramatically enhancing your operational efficiency.

Whether you’re looking to learn PowerShell and dbatools or to explore automation strategies, this workshop offers a rich blend of theoretical insights and interactive scenarios. Join me for a day of learning, collaboration, and fun that will allow you to take full control of your database operations with the combined power of PowerShell and dbatools.

Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 348

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric for the Data Professional

Join us for a full day of exploration into Microsoft Fabric, the revolutionary Software as a Service (SaaS) product that’s changing the game in Business Intelligence and Modern Analytics. For the last 3 years, Microsoft has been building this groundbreaking technology, which offers the ability to ingest and link to existing data without duplication. With Azure Synapse Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Data Warehousing, Realtime Analytics, and Power BI all at your fingertips, the possibilities are endless. In this pre-conference event, we’ll guide you through a full build scenario, showing you how to link existing data, and utilize OneLake. Join us and discover the power of Microsoft Fabric!

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 342

ETL, KQL, and RTI: Harnessing Data in Motion with Microsoft Fabric

Real-time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric brings us into the next generation of data movement and event-driven architecture. As the arms race of cloud data platforms continues, make sure you know the weapons at your disposal so you and your company are fully equipped for the future - because the future is not far away. While you may be familiar with RTI’s streaming data capabilities, did you know it can be an integral part of your ETL architecture? While you may have heard of KQL, did you know it can do data visualization? While you may have heard of RTI, did you know it can help you monitor your entire data estate?

Join RTI product group members and Microsoft Data Platform MVPs for a full day of learning. Takeaways include:

• Loading a full medallion architecture using RTI components
• Use case by use case breakdown of the components of RTI and how customers are using them today across their data estate
• Data visualization and trend analysis with KQL
• Monitoring your entire data estate using Real-time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric

Wednesday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 320-321

Azure 101

Microsoft Azure is a daunting thing to look at and think about. In this session, we'll look at the basics of Azure, what the options are for setting up an Azure account; as well as look at how regions are broken down. We'll take a look at the differences between Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service as well as the High Availability and Disaster Recovery options that are available to do with these services. We'll finish the session off by looking at some options for Virtual Machines within Azure as well as the SQL Server offerings that are available on the platform.

Wednesday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 340-341

Microsoft Fabric: Ultimate Data Security for Robust Data Warehousing

This session delves into the advanced security features of Microsoft Fabric, specifically designed for data warehousing. Attendees will learn how to classify and protect sensitive data using sensitivity labels and policies in Microsoft Purview.

The session will cover the implementation of Row-Level Security (RLS) to restrict access at the row level, ensuring users only see data relevant to their roles. Additionally, it will explore Column-Level Security (CLS) to secure specific columns in datasets, providing an extra layer of protection for sensitive information.

Participants will also discover how to use data masking techniques to obfuscate sensitive data, making it unreadable to unauthorized users while maintaining usability for authorized personnel. The session will emphasize aligning data warehousing practices with regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, leveraging Microsoft Fabric’s compliance tools and features.

Join us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how to secure your data warehouse end-to-end within Microsoft Fabric.

Wednesday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 343

The Ultimate Guide to Ola Hallengren's Maintenance Solution

When it comes to Database Maintenance, you just cannot ignore it. Did you know that traditional Maintenance Plans have been deprecated? Did you know that they often perform duplicate actions? It is time to take your maintenance to a different level and mentality.

You must have heard about Ola Hallengren by now. There are many environments that have default values running the show. This session is meant to take you through the maintenance solution from top to bottom and present some insights into how to get the most out of this solution.

When you leave this session, you will have a new understanding of what is possible beyond the defaults. Not only that I will show you the easy way to install this solution and preset the values in the jobs with very little effort. Join me for a power packed session that will give you all you need to know about this solution. See you there.

Wednesday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 344

Deep dive into Direct Lake

Join Patrick Leblanc and Phil Seamark for a deeper dive to discover what makes Direct Lake so fast. This session will cover important elements of monitoring and optimizing your Fabric data platform to unlock the full potential of Direct Lake, such as how to interpret Delta Analyzer logs and what to look out for if things slow down.

Wednesday 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 340-341

Securing SQL Server

Your organization's data will always be a primary target for adversaries. If you are using SQL Server to store this data, there are a wealth of settings and tools available to improve your security posture. In this talk, we will look at different methods of securing a SQL Server instance, from venerable (principle of least privilege, Transparent Data Encryption) to modern (Always Encrypted with secure enclaves, Microsoft Defender), and many things in between. These tools and techniques will show us ways for developers, database administrators, systems administrators, and network specialists to work together to secure SQL Server instances.

Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 340-341

Skills to Pay The Bills: Using AI Skills in Fabric

Have you struggled with the wide variety of ways to implement AI in and around your data? Which API to call? Which model to deploy? Where do I go for help? Did you know there are built-in AI skills in Microsoft Fabric that provide a single place for you to utilize AI in and around your Fabric data? Join me for this demo-rich 1-hour session as we learn about what AI skills can do for your data in Microsoft Fabric - and for you!

Wednesday 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 348

Visualization Magic in the Age of Numbers & Science

Power BI is a great sandbox environment for report design. However, knowing how to leverage visuals and features in a way that adds additional value can be challenging. New visualizations and features can be created a number of ways including: layering visuals, customizing visual formatting, and/or utilizing DAX measures. The session will include a series of visualization and reporting techniques that you'll be able to leverage in your company's reports to take them to the next level.

Thursday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 320-321

TSQL Best Practices Through Behavior Analysis

Ever wonder why your query behaves a certain way? Looking at the behavior of your query can lead you down a path to tuning. As with all queries, different servers will behave differently. With all those permutations (CPU, Memory, disk type, etc.) you can easily give up. But with these best practices you learn here, you have a shot at getting more consistent behavior by following them. I will show you what to look for and how to affect the behavior through better TSQL. Join me in a quest to write and tune queries by looking at how they behave.

Thursday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 340-341

Real Time Monitoring with Real-life Use Cases using Database Watcher

In this session, we are going to show you how easy it is to use Database Watcher, a cloud-native and cross-platform solution that supports multiple database types, versions, and platforms, to set up proactive database monitoring and collect deep and rich data. You will see how Database Watcher provides easy to understand visualizations, with near real time monitoring, which can help you optimize your database performance, availability, and health.

During this session we will cover the following with you:

• Brief overview of Database Watcher architecture
• Delve into real scenarios with Database Watcher dashboards
• Create custom dashboards for custom scenarios
• Using the power of KQL to query the raw monitoring data

Join us in this session and discover how Database Watcher can help you take your DBA career to the next level by enabling you to proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and improve your database operations.

Thursday 8:30 AM - 9:40 AM · Room 343

Performance and execution plan improvements in SQL Server 2025

SQL Server 2025 was announced in November 2024, and will probably be in preview, or perhaps already released, at the time of this conference. Join execution plan expert Hugo Kornelis as he takes an in-depth look at all the new features that affect query performance and execution plans.

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 342

Revolutionizing Data in Motion w/ Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric

If you work with data, you're generally dealing with two types of data: data in motion and data at rest. While we have many time-tested solutions for dealing with our data at rest, it hasn't been simple or straightforward to deal with data in motion - yet.

Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric opens the door to some truly innovative, low-code approaches to dealing with your data in motion, whether that data is in ETL processes, streaming data, or something else entirely. Join me for this hands-on walkthrough to RTI - what it is, what it isn't, and what it can do for you.

Thursday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 343

Become a project management samurai with Azure DevOps as your katana sword

Okey, so you have taken on the responsibility as a project manager or scrum master, and you want to plan your project, the tasks and the project team capacity. Should you do it like you usually do in excel, or do you want to try a cool tool, like Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps has a lot of cool features, not only relevant for your Azure environment. In this session we will take a look at the “Boards” feature and how you can use that for project management, project team capacity planning and project progress reporting.

Let’s dive into Azure DevOps!

Thursday 12:40 PM - 1:50 PM · Room 340-341

Best practices and Guidance when using Microsoft Dataverse

We'll cover best practices when developing solutions using Microsoft Dataverse. We'll cover guidance for API usage, form design, app performance, security, maintenance and more!

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 348

Introduction to Version Control, GIT, and Power BI Developer mode

This session will guide you through the basics of version control, ensuring you understand its significance for efficient Power BI project management. We will introduce you to GIT, a widely used version control system, without delving into intricate code or overly technical jargon. In just one hour, you will gain a genuine grasp of how it all works.

Key Topics Covered:

• Demystifying Version Control: We'll explain version control in plain language, emphasizing why it's pivotal for successful Power BI projects.

• An Introduction to GIT: Get a straightforward overview of GIT, without getting bogged down in technical details. Discover why it's so popular and beneficial.

• The Power of Power BI Developer Mode: Understand how the new Power BI Developer Mode simplifies development and collaboration, without diving into intricate coding.

• Version Control in Power BI: Not all users need GIT, so understand the options for all projects and different methods available.

• Practical Tips for Success: We'll share practical insights and straightforward tips for effectively using version control in Power BI.

Suitable for any data analyst, a Power BI developer, BI enthusiast, or anyone looking to understand enterprise features.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 344

Supercharge your analytics with Microsoft Fabric Real Time Intelligence

For many years, data has been primarily batch loaded from sources on fixed schedules, resulting in operational challenges, outdated data, and delayed insights. The introduction of Lambda architecture aimed to mitigate these issues by accelerating some data processing. Now, with Microsoft Real Time Intelligence, we can easily enhance analytics architecture to easily integrate "hot-path" approaches to make data available faster. In this instructional session, we will explore how to integrate event sourcing and other microservices patterns to achieve real-time data integration using Microsoft Fabric. Attendees will learn practical techniques and best practices for implementing these patterns to ensure seamless and efficient data flow.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 344

Harnessing the Power of Data Mesh: A Deep Dive into the Four Pillars of Modern Data Architecture

Abstract: In today's data-driven world, traditional data management approaches often struggle to keep pace with the growing complexity and scale of enterprise data. Enter Data Mesh, a revolutionary paradigm that redefines how organizations handle data. This session will explore the four foundational pillars of Data Mesh architecture: Domain-Oriented Decentralization, Data as a Product, Self-Serve Data Infrastructure, and Federated Computational Governance.

We'll delve into how Domain-Oriented Decentralization empowers teams to own and manage their data, fostering agility and innovation. Discover the concept of Data as a Product, where data is treated with the same rigor and care as any other product, ensuring quality and usability. Learn about Self-Serve Data Infrastructure, which democratizes data access and tooling, enabling teams to work independently and efficiently. Finally, understand the importance of Federated Computational Governance in maintaining security, compliance, and consistency across decentralized data environments.

Join us to gain insights into implementing Data Mesh in your organization, transforming your data strategy, and unlocking the full potential of your data assets.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 343

Data Virtualization in SQL Server 2022

PolyBase is Microsoft's primary data virtualization technology, allowing you to integrate SQL Server with a variety of external systems such as Oracle, MongoDB, Cosmos DB, Teradata, Apache Spark, and even other SQL Server instances. In this talk, we will walk through the mechanics of PolyBase, showing how we can write T-SQL queries to access data from heterogeneous sources. We will see how data virtualization in SQL Server has evolved over the years and the new capabilities you will find in SQL Server 2022. Finally, we will look at several interesting use cases for data virtualization in the modern data environment.

Friday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 343

Wait Wait Do Tell Me: A Look At SQL Server Wait Stats

Hurry up and wait, it happens to all of us, even SQL Server. Why is SQL Server waiting? What can we do about it? These questions will be addressed as we define what a wait really is in SQL Server and some approaches to make SQL wait less. This session, targeted at data professionals, managers, developers, and sys admins, will also explore a few of the common SQL waits and specifically what we can do about them