Haider Raza

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the data landscape, and Microsoft Azure makes it accessible for everyone. This session is designed for SQL Server professionals and data experts who want to take their first step into AI. We’ll demystify AI concepts, explore Azure AI services, and show how you can start building AI solutions without needing to be a data scientist. You’ll leave with a clear roadmap to prepare for the AI-900: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals certification, practical resources, and confidence to begin your AI journey.

Data modernization isn’t just about moving to the cloud, it’s about building a future-proof architecture that scales, interoperates, and avoids vendor lock-in. Apache Iceberg is the open standard making this possible, and platforms like Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, and Snowflake are leading the charge. In this session, we’ll show you how to harness Iceberg to unify your data estate and deliver analytics at enterprise scale.

Business Intelligence is evolving beyond dashboards. AI is now the engine driving insights. Imagine asking questions in natural language and instantly generating reports, models, and actionable insights. In this session, we’ll show how Microsoft Copilot and Fabric Data Agents make this a reality for enterprises.

SQL Server is designed as an operational database, while Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS platform built for analytics. They serve fundamentally different purposes, with distinct business and technical requirements. So why bring them together? The answer lies in unlocking new possibilities, combining transactional data with advanced analytics to deliver real-time insights, streamline data workflows, and enable AI-driven decision-making. In this session, we’ll explore the benefits and use cases of this integration, from simplifying data pipelines to empowering self-service analytics at scale.

Imagine asking your data a question in plain English and getting instant, actionable insights, right inside Teams. No dashboards to navigate, no queries to write. Just answers, automation, and AI at your fingertips.

What if your SQL database could not only store your data but also understand it? With SQL Server 2025, AI meets relational—bringing semantic search, real-time analytics, and intelligent automation into the heart of your data platform.

AI delivers value only when the data behind it is trusted and ready. This session explores how leaders can prepare an AI-ready data platform using Microsoft Cloud, enabling confident decision-making through trusted data, strong governance, and clear accountability.

Discover how Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview work together to enable trusted, self-service analytics. Learn how Data Products, lineage, and metadata help users find, understand, and confidently reuse datasets, accelerating insights while maintaining governance at scale.

SQL Server professionals don’t need to abandon T-SQL to succeed in the cloud — but they do need to understand how the platform has changed. This session explains how existing SQL Server data-warehousing skills translate directly to Microsoft Fabric’s Lakehouse and Fabric Data Warehouse. Through a practical, SQL-focused lens, we’ll explore how T-SQL runs in Fabric, how OneLake and Delta Lake change storage and performance considerations, and how traditional ETL and tuning patterns evolve in a distributed, cloud-native architecture. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of where SQL fits in Fabric, what changes compared to on-premises SQL Server, and how to design scalable, performant analytics solutions without relearning everything from scratch.

This session introduces the foundations of enterprise data governance using the unified Microsoft Purview experience, with Microsoft Fabric and Azure SQL Database as governed data sources. Learn how Purview automatically discovers and catalogues data assets, organises them using collections and governance domains, and supports a federated governance model. You will also see how governed, curated data products are created to align technical assets with business ownership, enabling trusted and reusable analytics across the organisation.

This session focuses on operational data governance using Microsoft Purview. Learn how to manage business glossaries, measure data quality, monitor governance health, and use built-in reports to maintain trust and accountability across Microsoft Fabric and Azure SQL data estates.

Open source databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL are increasingly part of modern Azure architectures. This session helps Azure SQL Database (SQL Server) professionals understand how their skills transfer, what differs, and how to run OSS databases effectively in Azure using real-world lessons and practical patterns.

Azure SQL is great, but with so many options—serverless vs provisioned, Hyperscale vs Business Critical, SQL MI vs SQL DB—most people still ask: “Where do I even start… and how do I go all the way to enterprise-grade?” This session takes you from beginner concepts to deep dive into advanced features and capibilities.

SQL Server 2025 brings game‑changing capabilities—vectors, AI integration, enhanced security, and massive performance improvements. Azure SQL PaaS delivers automatic scaling, built‑in intelligence, near‑zero maintenance, and a cloud-first operational model. But how do you decide which one is right for your workload… or whether you should use both? This session clears the fog.

Stop guessing if your data is "good enough." With the arrival of unified Microsoft Purview Governance, data quality is no longer a bolt-on—it’s built-in. Join this fast-paced, demo-led session to see how to automate profiling, define scalable rules, and use lineage to visualize how quality impacts your entire estate. Learn to move from reactive firefighting to proactive, governed trust in just 20 minutes.

Stop struggling with complex LIKE patterns and discover the power of native Regular Expressions now available in SQL Server 2025 , Azure SQL and Fabric SQL. This session explores the new regex functions that let you validate, clean, extract, and parse text more clearly and consistently than ever, with identical syntax across modern Microsoft SQL platforms (from Ground to Cloud). Learn how native regex improves maintainability, readability, and correctness in your T-SQL.

What if someone changed your data—and you couldn’t prove it? For regulated industries, that’s a nightmare scenario. In this 5-minute lightning sprint, we’ll end the “he-said, she-said” of data integrity. Watch a live demo of SQL Server / Azure SQL DB Ledger catching an unauthorised update red-handed. Discover how to achieve blockchain-level trust and cryptographic proof of integrity—without the complexity of a blockchain—using the SQL tools you already know.