SQLBits 2024

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

A intrepid group of SQLBits speakers will have just 5 minutes to deliver a presentation on an informative data-related topic of their choice. The catch? They'll be presented with random slides they've never seen before, and they must seamlessly incorporate these mystery slides into their talk. Our panel of judges will evaluate each performance based on a set of agreed-upon criteria, including audience voting!

You'll witness Data & Analytics experts demonstrating their wit, grace under pressure, and uncanny ability to turn the unexpected into pure entertainment. Expect a delightful fusion of knowledge and hilarity, as our speakers go head-to-head in this high-spirited showdown.

Mark Pryce-Maher's previous sessions

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

Fabric Product Group - Ask us Anything

Come and join the Fabric Product Group for one of our fireside chats. Bring your questions because we have all the answers!!

Fabric Power Hour

The famous Power BI Power Hour returns, but this time it has expanded to cover the whole of Fabric!

A Deep Dive into Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse

Deep Dive into Data Warehousing in Microsoft Fabric. Explore the intricacies of Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, unraveling its capabilities and demonstrating effective strategies for its utilization.

Synapse Q&A with PG

SQLBits' has brought members of the Azure Synapse Program Group to Wales to ask YOUR questions. Bring your questions for: Dedicated SQL Pools, Serverless SQL Pools, Spark Pools, Pipelines, Kusto and everything else Synapse related.

Lightning Talks

5 minute lightning talks from your favourite speakers

Dedicated SQL Pools : How some stuff 'really' works

Session covering table distributions, partitioning , RSC and materialised views.

Reporting on 1.4B rows with Serverless SQL Pools

Building a dashboard using Serverless SQL Pools in a performant way

Azure Synapse Analytics: Evolving Azure SQL Data Warehouse

In this session we explore Azure Synapse Analytics, we will dive into this limitless analytics service and explore how it brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics.

Modernizing & Migrating Your Data Warehouse w/ Azure Synapse

This session will dive into how to successfully migrate to Azure Synapse, all the way from code conversion to enterprise grade developer tooling, with real customer examples for product and migration experts.

Azure Machine Learning from the ground up

Azure Machine Learning is a fully managed cloud service for predictive analytics. In this 1hour session, we will run through; ML Studio,using data, Creating and running Experiments, visualising results, R , publishing and using experiments.

Building a SSMS Add-in; The Agony and Ecstasy

We will travel back in time a bit to SQL 2005 to see how SSMS Add-ins worked, then jump forward to the present day were we will go through the process of writing a SSMS Add-in for R2.

Rob Sewell's other proposed sessions for 2026

Infrastructure as Code for Humans: The Why, the How, and the ‘Please Don’t Click That’ - 2026

What an Automation Nerd Learnt by Automating Their Home (Besides Annoying Their Family) - 2026

Rob Sewell's previous sessions

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

20 mins to git comfortable

In this new world we're all developers! Whether we're writing application code or describing our infrastructure using bicep or terraform we need to keep it safe. Git and source control is our best option for developing on our own and as part of a team… but git is scary! In this 20 min session we'll go through just enough to git you comfortable with source control.

10 Productivity tools in 20 minutes

You are busy, we are busy, everyone is busy. These are the tools that two busy consultants use to improve their productivity. We want to tell you about the tools that we use; that maximise our time, simplify our life, reduce our key strokes and generally make us appear more amazing. So that you can use them too. We have 20 minutes, so we wont go into much detail but we have some good quick stories to tell.

There is a time and a place for everything

There is a time and a place for everything. John and Rob, being consultants, often say "Well, it depends" Lets talk about some of the times when the "rules" may not fit

SQL Notebooks in Azure Data Studio for the DBA

While you might have read about notebooks being used for Data Science, this session is for DBAs. You will see how you can use SQL Notebooks to simplify your work.

How To Start Collaborating With A GitHub Repository

Wanted to join with open-source projects but don’t know how? This quick session will give you all that you need to start doing so.

Creating Azure SQL Db Users with an SPN using Azure DevOps

This session will take you through the steps required to build an automated solution to create an Azure SQL Database with a Service Principal and create users and apply permissions

Validate Your SQL Server Estate with Ease Using dbachecks

Learn how you can validate your SQL Server estate with ease using dbachecks

Introduction to Pester-TDD for PowerShell

Start from nothing and use Test Driven Development to write a PowerShell function that uses the Microsoft Cognitive Services API to analyse pictures. I will take you on a journey from nothing to a complete function

Advice and guidance on becoming a speaker or volunteer

Want to become a community speaker or involved in the SQL Community? Don't feel confident enough to try? Need some advice and guidance? We want to help you, we will help you

Simon Whiteley's previous sessions

Behind the Hype - Architecture Trends in Data

Seasoned Data Engineer and YouTube grumbler Simon Whiteley takes us on a journey through the current industry trends and buzzwords, carving through the hype to get at the underlying ideals. Which is going to last and which is a sales gimmick? Which bandwagon might actually take you in the right strategic direction?

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

Behind the Hype - Architecture Trends in Data

In this session, seasoned data engineer and youtube grumbler Simon Whiteley takes us on a journey through the current industry trends and buzzwords, carving through the hype to get at the underlying ideals.

Building a Lakehouse on the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

This session session aims to give you that context. We'll look at how spark-based engines work and how we can use them within Synapse Analytics. We'll dig into Delta, the underlying file format that enables the Lakehouse, and take a tour of how the Synapse compute engines interact with it. Finally, we'll draw out our whole Lakehouse architecture

Bringing Data Lakes to your Purview

A short, fast dive into the specific elements of Azure Purview that work well with Data Lakes, and how you implement them yourselves

Value-Driven Analytics Development

Ever spent an age releasing a data model, only to find no-one uses it? There's a better way of working, driven by both technology & agile working practices, let me tell you about Value Driven Development & DataOps

Databricks, Delta Lake and You

Databricks, Lakes & Parquet are a match made in heaven, but explode with extra power when using Delta Lake. This session will dive into the details of how Databricks Delta works and how to make the most of it.

The Azure Spark Showdown - Databricks VS Synapse Analytics

Azure now has two slick, platform-as-a-service spark offerings, but which one should you choose? A separate specialist tools or a one-size-fits-all solution? Join Simon as he compares and contrasts the spark offerings.

Azure SQL DataWarehouse: 0-100 (DWUs)

Azure SQLDW - WHAT, WHERE, WHEN and HOW to use it.

Benni De Jagere's other proposed sessions for 2026

A Whirlwind Tour of the Fabric Capacity Metrics App - 2026

Copilot in Fabric - Explained for the Administrator! - 2026

Deep Dive into Microsoft Fabric Capacities: Fundamentals, Concepts, and Advanced Strategies - 2026

Demystifying the on-premises data gateway (for Power BI Semantic Models) - 2026

End-to-end Monitoring for Microsoft Fabric - 2026

Exploring permission boundaries in Microsoft Fabric - 2026

Fabric Capacities, beyond the obvious - 2026

Panel Debate: Real-World Microsoft Fabric Administration - Lessons from the Trenches - 2026

Slide Karaoke - Ultimate Showdown! - 2026

Star Schema ALL the things! But why? - 2026

Understanding Fabric Capacities - 2026

Benni De Jagere's previous sessions

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

Asking questions to get meaningful answers

By making sure we're supplying the other party with the compact information they need, and making sure we're "forcing" them to give a decent answer, there's a lot more information we can receive. By getting the information we need, we'll be able to proceed quicker, and getting to results faster.

Setting yourself up for success when submitting to present

During this session we'll cover how you find those elusive speaking opportunities and how you can make the most of it with just a few simple things to keep in mind. Most importantly, what can you do to help understand organizers or selection committees why exactly your session would be a good fit for them, and why you think it would be a good fit for their audience.

Star Schema ALL the things! But why?

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.

You're a Power BI Admin? Let's get your threads aligned for Fabric!

This session will focus on the life of a Power BI Admin moving over to the extended Fabric realm, and keeping their things in check. We'll look at the familiar topics of capacity and workspace management, and how they align with the new workloads that have been introduced. We'll notice there's a very large overlap, as Fabric has been built on the foundations of Power BI.

How to write a Session Abstract, to get chosen to speak

Writing an abstract is hard, especially for a session you'll probably only be presenting a few months down the road. But have you considered consciously on the words you're writing in there, and what kind of expectations they set to other parties? Having a balanced abstract will help set the expectations for your presentation correctly, before it actually starts. Clearly outlining the goals helps all parties involved, most importantly yourself!

Troubleshooting Power BI Reports

Starting off with the new Performance Analyzer Pane, we'll demonstrate how you can pinpoint bottlenecks in your report, and take actions on these insights. With the myriad of root causes that are out there, an elimination approach might suit us very well. Some of the main causes will be explained, and we'll get you going on how you can fix it for yourselves.

Asking questions to get meaningful answers

Asking questions is a very powerful tool, but can be bothersome to wield. By making sure we're supplying the other party with the compact information they need, and making sure we're "forcing" them to give a decent answer, there's a lot more information we can receive. By getting the information we need, we'll be able to proceed quicker, and getting to results faster.

Power BI dataflows? Why you need to implement it!

During this session, the core concepts of Power BI Dataflows will be explained, and we'll discuss how Power BI Dataflows could alleviate some of the specific problems you might be experiencing in your current architecture.

Troubleshooting Power BI Report Performance

Starting off with the new Performance Analyzer Pane, we'll demonstrate how you can pinpoint bottlenecks in your Power BI reports, and take actions on these insights.

Linda Torrång's previous sessions

Streamlining Power BI with PowerShell

Power BI is a vital tool for data analytics, but managing workspaces, access, and data sets manually can be time-consuming and error-prone. This session explores how PowerShell automation simplifies and streamlines these tasks.

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

Anyone can be an alphabet soup ally

Folks that belong to the queer community are often referred to as LGBTQ+, Jess and Linda represent a small portion of the letters within this alphabet soup and they will guide you through some common situations where you can be a good ally. There is no one right answer, but there are ways for you to prepare for certain situations so you know what your best move might be to provide support and allyship. This session will provide tips for people who are new to being an ally and for existing allies who want to add skills to their toolbelt.

+5 Wisdom - Learn to Ask Better Questions to Solve the Right Problems

By asking the right questions we can solve the actual problem - not only the problem we think we are facing. Take a step back, look further, and ask better questions. We'll show you how.

Multitasking for Mortals - How to Stop Multitasking and Start Getting Things Done

Humans were never meant to multitask - fact is, the human brain is not even capable of true multitasking. Despite this we keep trying to achieve more in less time, and in the end we achieve less and suffer from more stress. There are ways to stop trying to multitask and instead embrace structure and methods for actually getting things done. Let me show you.

How to avoid the most common junior mistakes

Junior makes mistakes. That's part of being junior. But we don't have to make the SAME mistakes over and over again - let's talk about how to make starting life in the tech lane a bit easier.

Learning to Listen - Making the Most of Mentoring

Being a mentor or a mentee offer amazing opportunities but come with their own sets of challenges. We'll help you make the most of mentoring!

Mathias Halkjaer's other proposed sessions for 2026

Beware! SQL Injection through ADF/Pipelines - 2026

Fabric Data Agents and beyond - 2026

Ingesting API data with Python Notebooks - 2026

Navigating Data Modeling in Direct Lake - 2026

The Future of Data - 2026

Vibecoding examples for data professionals - 2026

Vibe-coding for the data professional - 2026

When data lies - typical patterns for manipulating data - 2026

Mathias Halkjaer's previous sessions

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

A deep dive into Direct Lake

The new Direct Lake storage mode in Power BI promises to revolutionize data handling by blending the real-time nature of DirectQuery and the high performance of Import mode. Is this all just hype, or does Direct Lake truly deliver on these claims?

Advanced Power BI refresh with ADF/Synapse

After this session, you will be able to conceptualize and implement different Power BI refresh scheduling patterns in ADF/Synapse. You’ll learn what limitations in Power BI you can overcome with an “external” orchestration tool as well as the different building blocks available. Finally, we will go through an example implementation as well as a step-by-step demo of how you can set this up yourself.

Supercharge Power BI with Azure Synapse Analytics

In this session we will cover how to architect an end-to-end enterpise analytics platform so that we utilize the best of both worlds. The extremely versatile ETL capabilities of Synapse and the powerful data modelling in Power BI.

Marthe Moengen's previous sessions

Data Mesh vs Data Fabric - in Microsoft Fabric

This session delves into the comparison of Data Mesh and Data Fabric, what are their benefits and limitations? How are they different, and can they coexist? And in Microsoft Fabric, how would you go about implementing these architectural frameworks in practice?

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

How to automate your data actions through Data Activator

In this session, we will delve into how Activator enables your organization to get closer to its data-driven goals.

The Future of Data Analytics: Adapting to the Shifting Technology Landscape

Why is Microsoft Fabric so revolutionary and could we have seen it coming? What are the key features and capabilities that make Fabric a catalyst for change in the technology landscape? What characterizes disruptive technology, and what are the trends going forward? What does the future of data and analytics look like?

Building trust in your data. Why data governance is the key to success.

Join us to learn why data governance is increasing in popularity and what you need to know about what data governance really is.

Power BI Datamart - What, How and Why?

In this short session, we will go through the what, how and why of Power BI Datamarts. What is this feature you can find in Power BI Service? How can you use it to model your data, improve control and enable self-service? Why should you use Power BI Datamarts?

Keynote by The Community

Ben and Rob have found some wonderful folk to actually do the important parts of the community keynote. on the theme of How to be a nonpassive member of the data community

Liping Huang's other proposed sessions for 2026

Import vs. Direct Query vs. Direct Lake Power BI on Databricks storage mode considerations - 2026

Liping Huang's previous sessions

Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024

Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!

Introducing your Databricks Flight Assistant

Buckle up for a high-flying adventure! Discover how to get your very own Co-Pilot like assistant in Databricks. With the Lakehouse Assistant, simply chat with it in English, and watch as it effortlessly crafts SQL queries and scripts, demystifies complex code, and even patches up errors, all while you gently cruise above the Lakehouse.

Air Traffic Control (Data Governance) with Databricks Unity Catalog, tips, tricks and best practices

The session is aimed at Platform Admin and Data Governance personas. It is a beginner session with no prerequisites. Audience will walk away with understanding about the data governance requirements of people, process and technology. Also how new capabilities in Unity Catalog can further simplify your data governance and accelerated analytics and AI initiatives on the lakehouse.