The Agenda

Learn how to design reports that matter and turn insights into action. This PreCon covers understanding your audience, creating impactful reports, and using storytelling and communication techniques to ensure long-term impact.

DAX can feel overwhelming - not because it is complicated, but because its core concepts are deeply interconnected. In this session, we break DAX down into its essential pillars and build them back up step by step, so you truly begin to understand how everything works together. We will gradually explore each fundamental concept in isolation, ensuring clarity before combining them into more advanced scenarios. Through practical business examples in Power BI Desktop, you will not just see how DAX works: you will understand why it works. For example, if you want to learn DAX, you must accept (at the end of the session), the following weird statements 1 – SUM does not exist 2 – FILTER does not “filter” 3 – Variables are constant This training day will take you through each of the five DAX Pillars of row context, filter context, iterators, context transition and expanded tables. Every concept will be applied immediately through hands-on exercises using sample data. Structure of the Session – the five DAX pillars: 1) The Foundations: Row Context & Calculated Columns • What is row context really? • How calculated columns evaluate expressions • Understanding evaluation one row at a time • Common misunderstandings and mistakes 2) Thinking in Filters: Filter Context & Measures • What is filter context? • How visuals generate filters • How measures respond dynamically • The difference between row context and filter context You will see how Power BI evaluates measures and how filters shape results. 3) When Contexts Meet: Iterators • How iterators create row context inside measures and virtual tables • How row context and filter context interact • Practical use of SUMX, TOPN and CONCATENATEX • Using DAX Query View to evaluate table output 4) The Game Changer: Context Transition (CALCULATE) • Why CALCULATE is the most important DAX function • What context transition really means • How CALCULATE transforms row context into filter context • Step-by-step breakdown of evaluation logic Particular care will be applied to CALCULATE, ensuring you understand not only syntax but evaluation mechanics. 5) The Hidden Structure: Expanded Tables • What expanded tables are • How relationships affect filter propagation • Why understanding expanded tables changes everything regarding performance (filter columns and not tables) By the end of this session, you will: • A solid mental model of how DAX evaluation really works • Clearly understand row context, filter context, and how they differ • Understand how relationships and expanded tables impact results

Power BI Desktop shines with the right tooling. This workshop dives into external tools, governance services, modern modeling features, and scalable self-service patterns so you can build reliable, high-quality semantic models end to end.

SQL Server skills transfer to Microsoft Fabric. In a one-day workshop covering Lakehouses and Warehouses, you’ll dive into engines, query plans, stats, and Delta Lake, and leave confident applying what you already know.

Query Store takes the guesswork out of SQL Server performance by revealing exactly when and why queries change, making it easier to diagnose regressions, stabilize workloads, and prevent late-night emergencies. Attend this session to learn practical techniques, best practices, and new platform capabilities that help you resolve issues quickly and keep systems running reliably. This session is ideal for DBAs, database engineers, and SQL developers responsible for maintaining performance-critical workloads.

A full day dedicated to optimize DAX code and semantic models in Power BI

Brent Ozar loves K-Pop Demon Hunters, so this demo-driven class hunts down the real causes of production slowness. Watch dev and prod face off as Brent uncovers golden clues in plans, settings, and data that explain why the same query behaves so differently.

This training day provides an end-to-end approach to designing high-performing Microsoft Fabric Warehouses. It covers loading strategies, schema and query design, performance features, Workload Management, and deployment practices, with a strong focus on performance and cost efficiency. Real project examples and feedback from data engineering teams illustrate how design decisions behave in practice. Attendees leave with a clear mental model that enables informed, scalable, and predictable warehouse design.

A full end-to-end masterclass on AI in Power BI. During this training day, we’ll cover every corner of AI in Power BI, from preparing data for AI to bringing your Power BI AI assets to life with AI.

Unlock the power of your own data by combining Microsoft SQL (SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, or SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric) with cutting-edge AI techniques. In this workshop, you’ll learn about embeddings and vector search and why they matter for modern AI applications. We’ll guide you through generating embeddings using similarity search to retrieve the most relevant data. We’ll implement the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern by calling a Chat model, then explore its limitations. Evolve into Agentic RAG and create an orchestrator to intelligently choose between running semantic search or writing a SQL query to answer complex requests. Learn to secure data access so that only authorized information is available to AI agents using Row-Level Security By the end, you’ll have built an end-to-end solution that combines SQL’s reliability with AI’s intelligence and be well prepared for SQL AI Developer certification exam.