22-25 April 2026 
The First Step: Empowering New Tech Speakers
Regular 50 minute session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
This session helps tech and data professionals overcome the fear of public speaking and begin their journey as confident presenters. You’ll gain practical steps, encouragement, and strategies to build your voice, grow your skills, and share your expertise with the community.
Session Details
Have you ever wanted to share your knowledge with the data community but felt nervous about public speaking? Many talented professionals hesitate because the first step feels overwhelming. This session helps anyone in the tech or data space, whether you’re an analyst, engineer, developer, architect, or student, move past that hesitation and confidently begin their speaking journey.
You’ll explore the real path from uncertainty to confidence, learning the challenges new speakers face, the breakthroughs that make a difference, and the practical strategies that help you develop your voice. Attendees should join if they are looking to grow professionally, strengthen communication skills, or simply start giving back to the community by sharing what they know.
In this session, you will learn how to:
1. Take the first steps toward becoming a speaker
2. Overcome common fears and barriers to public speaking
3. Build confidence through practice and preparation
4. Strengthen both technical and communication skills
5. Use speaking opportunities to accelerate career growth
6. Connect with supportive communities and resources
You’ll leave with practical guidance, renewed motivation, and the confidence to share your expertise, whether on a stage, in a meetup, or within your own organization.
You’ll explore the real path from uncertainty to confidence, learning the challenges new speakers face, the breakthroughs that make a difference, and the practical strategies that help you develop your voice. Attendees should join if they are looking to grow professionally, strengthen communication skills, or simply start giving back to the community by sharing what they know.
In this session, you will learn how to:
1. Take the first steps toward becoming a speaker
2. Overcome common fears and barriers to public speaking
3. Build confidence through practice and preparation
4. Strengthen both technical and communication skills
5. Use speaking opportunities to accelerate career growth
6. Connect with supportive communities and resources
You’ll leave with practical guidance, renewed motivation, and the confidence to share your expertise, whether on a stage, in a meetup, or within your own organization.
3 things you'll get out of this session
1. Learn how to take the first steps toward becoming a confident speaker.
2. Understand how to overcome common fears and strengthen communication skills.
3. Gain practical strategies to use speaking opportunities for personal and career growth.
2. Understand how to overcome common fears and strengthen communication skills.
3. Gain practical strategies to use speaking opportunities for personal and career growth.
Speakers
Deepthi Goguri's other proposed sessions for 2026
Performance Tuning: How Query Store Saves Your Server (and Your Sleep) - 2026
EmpowerHER Tech: How Allies Drive Real Change - 2026
From Confusion to Clarity: Understanding Fabric Capacity Like a Pro - 2026
From Risk to Resilience: Building a Secure Azure SQL Environment - 2026
When Good Queries Go Bad: Fixing Performance with Query Store - 2026
Deepthi Goguri's previous sessions
A to Z Azure SQL Security Concepts
Planning to move your databases to the cloud but seriously doubt if your data is 100% secure? No matter if you are on-prem or in the cloud, making sure your data is protected in every angle possible is the most crucial and important step in building a secure data tier of an application. Let's dedicate this session to knowing the different multi-layer defense-in-depth security techniques and strategies available to armor your Azure SQL database. let's dive deep into each of these layers starting with the network security, Azure role-based access control (RBAC), data security at the row level, auditing, advanced threat protection, different layers of encryption, monitoring, and more. By the end of this session, you will have the knowledge to make the right security decisions for your environments and implement these techniques in securing your data.
Can an Introvert become an International Speaker? If so, How?
Are you a data professional and would like to share your learnings with others but are scared to speak in public? Are you an Introvert and are comfortable in your own space but also wanted to make an impact in this world? Is something inside you pulling you back from taking the action on your dream?
Meet the two data platform speakers who started their speaking journey from the same exact situation but now sharing their learnings across the world helping other data professionals in their journey.
How did they actually begin, what challenges did they go through and who helped them along the way?
As they speak about their incredible journey, they will share some key details in becoming a speaker, the advantages, steps to improve data skills and develop careers along the way so the audience can carry the knowledge as they take their first steps in becoming one.
Different dimensions of monitoring and tuning performance for Azure SQL
Azure SQL performance capabilities, how to configure and maintain your Azure SQL for higher performance. We will explore various monitoring tools and pick few scenarios for deeper troubleshooting. In this demo centric session, we will tune our database and find an optimal ground to manage cost. We will generate Power BI powered database score card for trend analysis.
Troubleshoot and Triage Like a Pro
Let us walk you through our steps to triage and troubleshoot issues as they come in to make sure things get fixed in the right order at the right time and we all stay sane.