Keynote Speakers
Explore speakers' bios and topics.
Alberto Ferrari
Alberto started working with SQL Server in 2000 and immediately his interest focused on Business Intelligence. He and Marco Russo created sqlbi.com, where they publish extensive content about Business Intelligence. Alberto published several books about Analysis Services, Power BI, and Power Pivot. He is a Microsoft MVP and he earned the SSAS Maestro title, the highest level of certification on Microsoft Analysis Services technology. Today, Alberto's main activities are in the delivery of DAX and data modeling workshops for Power BI and Analysis Services all around the world. Alberto offers consulting services on large and complex data warehouses to provide assessments and validation of project analysis or to perform specific problem-solving activities. Alberto is a well-known speaker at many international conferences, like PASS Summit, Sqlbits, and Microsoft Ignite. He loves to be on stage both at large events and at smaller user groups meetings, exchanging ideas with other SQL and BI fans. When traveling for work, he likes to engage with local user groups to provide evening sessions about his favorite topics. Thus, you can easily meet Alberto by looking up local Power BI user groups during scheduled courses. Outside of SQLBI, most of Alberto's personal time is spent practicing video games, in the vain hope of eventually beating his son.
Why DAX?
Details for Alberto’s keynote session are nearly complete. Get ready for his inspiring presentation
Pawel Potasinski
Member of the Microsoft Fabric Customer Advisory Team (CAT). In his professional career Pawel has always been associated with data engineering and analytics (SQL, BI, Big Data). Founder of the Polish SQL Server Users Group (PLSSUG), today known as Data Community Poland. Regular speaker at conferences, community events and user groups. Former Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).
How to grow as a data professional in the era of AI?
Details for Pawel´s keynote session are nearly complete. Get ready for his inspiring presentation
Speakers
Explore speakers' bios and topics.
Gregor Brunner
Working with Power BI for over 7 years | Power BI External Tool | Measure Killer
Power BI
Best practices for developing Power BI reports
In this session we will look at the most important best practices when developing a Power BI report and how these best practices can improve our life as developers.
We will differentiate best practices in the following three areas:
- Power Query / M
- Data modeling & DAX
- Visualization
Within these areas, we will see which best practices have an impact on performance and which ones help you to better organize your artifacts and improve usability of the report and readability of your code.
Remember that best practices are mostly not for you, the developer who has built this report. The main benefit is if we open a report from someone else or inherit one from a colleague, that is when you will start appreciating people following best practices.
Won’t you appreciate being handed over a nicely organized report that fullfils the most important best practices? Make it your mission to stand by them when you build Power BI reports.
Benni De Jagere
Benni is a Senior Program Manager in the Fabric Customer Advisory Team (Fabric CAT) at Microsoft. Aspiring to be top notch in his field, through continuous personal development, on both technical and soft skills. He strives for maximum results in his tasks using team play, communication, thinking outside of the box, and (endless) motivation. Benni is always ready to tackle the unknown, or pick up fresh ideas to broaden his range. Building on past experiences, he continuously tries to find new, more efficient ways of obtaining results, and improving the process along the way. Loving (almost) every day of it, he’s fascinated by the value of data, sometimes flabbergasted by the lack of awareness, and intrigued by the endless possibilities whilst discovering new ways of looking at data. He thrives on unfolding new insights for customers whilst using an open and transparent communication. On a daily basis he turns (large amounts of) coffee into insights for customers, and references witty British comedy, lame dad jokes, and obscure facts way too often. Overly enthusiastic about anything data related, he’s trying hard to keep up with all things new and shiny. When not working, blogging or reading, you’ll likely find him out and about being his weird self. Rumour has it that he’s also involved with a ragtag band of data enthusiasts, enjoying themselves whilst organising cool community things. They go by the name of .. dataMinds!
Power BI
Star Schema ALL the things! But why?
Perhaps you’ve seen “Star Schema ALL the things!”, “Never use Calculated Columns”, or “Bi-Directional relationships suck” before when thinking about design considerations for your data model, but you’ve never really stopped to think about the specifics behind them and why exactly they could benefit or hurt your model. Who knows, maybe that specific advice doesn’t even work out for the scenario at hand and you might not be aware because you’ve skipped a few steps in the process.
Come along in this journey from source to model to report using a practical mindset, thinking about the design decisions and ramifications along the way. At the core of the session lies the message to think about best practices, with the added step to test, assess, and benchmark what exactly they do for you.
Whether it be the decision of where your transformations need to be done, how exactly the data and tables need to be modelled or what you allow the end users to do with your model these are all important steps to take, preferably without shortcuts. We’ll take the steps on a moderately complex data model, and measure as we move along.
Meaning, at the end of the session we’ll have discussed why Star Schema’s can help you, and how you can assess for yourselves if they are beneficial for your use case.
Sally Dabbah
Meet Sally! Sally serves as a Data Engineer with an expertise in Azure Cloud Analytics Services, with years of experience under her belt. Since earning her B.Sc. degree in Software Engineering, Sally has become a significant voice in Azure Cloud Analytics Services, publishing over ten blogs on Microsoft's Tech Community blog. What excites Sally most about her work is the opportunity to build Proof of Concepts (POCs) that help Microsoft customers unlock their business potential – by doing so, she remains true to her ultimate mission: to empower innovation through Azure's boundless possibilities. Away from her professional endeavors, Sally finds joy in baking pastries, a hobby she shares with her followers on Instagram for inspiration.
Fabric
Efficient Data Partitioning with Microsoft Fabric: Best Practices and Implementation Guide
Imagine having a vast encyclopedia, and your task is to find a specific page containing a particular word. Instead of searching through the entire encyclopedia, you opt to navigate directly to the relevant section that might contain the desired information. This approach allows you to narrow down your search scope and quickly find the page you need. This concept of narrowing down the search space by dividing data into manageable sections is precisely what partitioning entails.
Erik Svensen
Microsoft Data Platform MVP, ex-Leader of Power BI Usergroup Denmark - Huge Power BI fan and :o)
Power BI
A delightful Power Concert
In this session I will show you different ways of building a Power concert where we make the different instruments in the Power Platform band play together in a perfect harmony.
I will demo how can we make Power Apps and Automate drive actions from directly in Power BI and how we can connect Power Apps to Power BI reports and how to get data from Power BI into Power Automate.
Combining these instruments will enable you to play power full tunes that will make your users sing along.
It will be a demo heavy session that should give you inspiration to compose your own power tunes 🙂
Nikola Ilic
I'm making music from the data! Power BI and Microsoft Fabric addict, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Pluralsight Author, blogger, speaker...Interested in everything related to data - always eager to extract valuable info from raw data in the most effective way. Multi-year experience working with (predominantly) Microsoft Data Platform (SQL Server, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, and Power BI). Father of 2 and true football (and Barca) fan!
Power BI
From XL to S – Reduce your Power BI model size by 90%!
Have you ever wondered what makes Power BI so fast and powerful when it comes to performance? So powerful, that it performs complex calculations over millions of rows in a blink of an eye.
In this session, we will dig deep to discover what is “under the hood” of Power BI, how your data is being stored, compressed, queried, and finally, brought back to your report. After the session, you will get a better understanding of the hard work happening in the background and appreciate the importance of creating an optimal data model in order to get maximum performance from the Power BI engine.
Finally, you will see a real use-case demo showing how the Power BI data model was reduced by 90%!
I will demo how can we make Power Apps and Automate drive actions from directly in Power BI and how we can connect Power Apps to Power BI reports and how to get data from Power BI into Power Automate.
Combining these instruments will enable you to play power full tunes that will make your users sing along.
It will be a demo heavy session that should give you inspiration to compose your own power tunes 🙂
Bernat Agulló
Passionate about Power BI in general and DAX and Calculation Groups in particular. Strong background in Excel, T-SQL and SSIS. Stints in Tableau and Qlik. Coming from Engineering background and working with consulting companies I like understanding the business problem working directly with the customer.
Power BI
C# Scripts for Tabular Editor are not that tough: Bringing Visual Studio into the party
If you are not a C# Jedi, trying to write C# scripts for Tabular Editor in Tabular Editor 2 is quite of a challenge. At least it was for me. With time I found out how to bring development over to Visual Studio, and how to bring the code back easily into tabular Editor. In this session I demo how to set up the environment and start coding away in a much more confortable way.
Augustin Dokoza Bukvic
Augustin is an Analytics Architect, Microsoft Certified Trainer, Speaker, and Power Platform User Group Stuttgart founder and leader. Working as a CoE lead and a Solution Architect with the main focus on the Power BI platform and Data Governance. Working with Power BI since the public preview version and delivered multiple large-scale enterprise analytics projects for Fortune 500 companies. Passionate about data culture and governance. Currently working as a Director Analytics Center of Enablement at Thrasio a next-generation consumer goods company reimagining how the world’s most-loved products become accessible to everyone.
Power BI
Citizen data analyst hitchiker guide to Power BI
You are passionate about data analysis and ended up installing Power BI, but what now? where to go, and what are all those terms?
Don’t worry, this session will guide you through the Power BI language.
What’s the difference between the Direct Query and Live Connect? Then…Data…Dataset – Dataflow – Datamart…What are all these?! “I’ve created a wonderful dashboard”. You mean, report? No…yes…I don’t know the difference ☹
Can I use DAX to create calculated columns in Power Query? And, how to create measures in Power Query? (No, you can’t do that, it’s a different language). I’ve installed the data gateway, now I need to choose the proper mode – I should go with personal, right?
In this session, we will demystify the most common sources of confusion among Power BI practitioners and explain differences and similarities between various Power BI terms and concepts. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of the terminology and feel more confident talking Power BI!
Marc Lelijveld
Data Platform MVP, FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect, Microsoft Certified Trainer, Power BI enthusiastic, public speaker and passionate for everything which transforms data into action! Working at Macaw in the Netherlands as Data & Analytics Solution Architect. What I like the most? Sharing my thoughts, experience, best-practices and enthusiasm about Microsoft data platform with others. I mostly do this in public speaking at usergroups, conferences, customer presentations and end-user training.
Fabric, Power BI
Exploring Fabric Semantic Link for Power BI folks!
If you’re coming from a Power BI world, the whole Fabric thing might scare you a bit. Then suddenly, there is something called Semantic Link, which allows connections from Fabric Notebooks to read both data and meta data from your Power BI Semantic Model (dataset).
You might wonder, what’s all this? How does it work and how to take benefit from it? Especially when you’re not familiar yet with notebooks at all.
In this session we will explore what Semantic Link is, how you as Power BI developer/engineer can make use of it and how it will strengthen your solutions in the end. Together, we will explore various aspects like:
- Warming up your data in direct lake datasets
- Querying Dynamic Management Views,
- Reading Semantic Model meta data to generate documentation
- Extend or even forecast your data using Semantic Link
By the end of this session, you will not only grasp the basics of Semantic Link but also gain practical insights into its application so you can bring it to practice directly!
Johan Ludvig Brattås
Johan Ludvig Brattås is a director at Deloitte, and a dedicated community guy. He has worked with MS SQL server since late 1999, mostly with BI in one form or another. Since 2015, most of his work has been in the cloud working on data platform services such as Snowflake, Databricks and Synapse. Combining his passion for MS SQL Server with his passion for sharing knowledge, he started speaking at various events in the SQL Community. This is also a way to give back to the community for all the things he has learned over the years. When not working, Johan Ludvig either spends his time with his kids, playing with new technology or teaching coeliacs how to bake glutenfree food.
Fabric
Make Fabric the Gold layer of your multi-cloud medallion architecture!
While Microsoft Fabric is a full-blown data platform in its own right, you might allready have invested in a modern data platform allready.
You still use Power BI of course – because that is the best tool out there.
That might come with a cost – such as slower reports or egress costs. Or you might miss out on some new functionality in your current solution that Fabric promises to deliver.
Microsoft has got you covered!
Come join me to see how Fabric can be positioned as your gold layer – or part of the gold layer in your data platform.
We will look at data mirroring, shortcuts, and all the nice little tricks available to get the best of both worlds: Your existing data platform and Microsoft Fabric!
Key take-aways:
Learn how Fabric can integrate with solutions such as Databricks, SQL dwh or Snowflake to give you the best of both worlds.
Learn how data mirroring works in the different systems.
Understand how shortcuts and OneLake APIs can help you.