22-25 April 2026 
Do You Really Need a Data Lakehouse? Separating Hype from Business Need
Proposed session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
Join this session to unpack what a Lakehouse is, the benefits it actually delivers, the problems it’s designed to solve, and the warning signs that your current warehouse may be holding you back. I’ll discuss practical decision criteria to help you determine whether a Lakehouse approach fits your goals or if your data platform is already doing everything you need.
Session Details
The Lakehouse promises to blend the best of data lakes and warehouses, but is it the right move for your organisation?
Many data teams feel pressured to modernise their stack because it’s what everyone else seems to be doing, but successful architectures should be driven by business needs, not industry trends.
Join this session to unpack what a Lakehouse is, the benefits it actually delivers, the problems it’s designed to solve, and the warning signs that your current warehouse may be holding you back. I’ll discuss practical decision criteria to help you determine whether a Lakehouse approach fits your goals or if your data platform is already doing everything you need.
Many data teams feel pressured to modernise their stack because it’s what everyone else seems to be doing, but successful architectures should be driven by business needs, not industry trends.
Join this session to unpack what a Lakehouse is, the benefits it actually delivers, the problems it’s designed to solve, and the warning signs that your current warehouse may be holding you back. I’ll discuss practical decision criteria to help you determine whether a Lakehouse approach fits your goals or if your data platform is already doing everything you need.
3 things you'll get out of this session
- Understanding of what a Data Lakehouse is
- The benefits of a Data Lakehouse over other architectures
- Why they might consider keeping their existing architecture/warehouse
Speakers
Craig Porteous's other proposed sessions for 2026
Centralise or Federate - How to Scale your Lakehouse - 2026
Craig Porteous's previous sessions
Zero to Lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric
Fabric is Microsoft's unified software as a service data platform, built around a Data Lakehouse architecture. In this session I'll share an array of data Lakehouse architecture patterns, and demonstrate how you can build a full Data Lakehouse platform without ever touching an Azure resource.
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
Designing Data Architectures that InfoSec will actually approve
In this session I'll guide you from through a secure reference architecture with Data Factory, Databricks, Data Lake, and Azure Synapse, working together as a secure, fully productionised platform. Each has their own idiosyncrasies, but this session will teach you the options available and the pitfalls to avoid.
Why the Lakehouse?
In this session I'll cover what the Data Lakehouse architecture is, where it fits against existing architectures like a data warehouse, and why you should build one. We'll also cover the underlying technology options to arm you with all of the information you need to plan your next data platform.
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