DATACON, a Microsoft Data Platform conference, brings together top experts, industry leaders, and data professionals for an immersive five-day experience. Focused on cutting-edge Microsoft data technologies—including Azure SQL Databases, Microsoft Fabric, SQL Server, and Real-Time Intelligence—DATACON delivers deep technical insights and practical solutions to help individuals and organizations unlock the full potential of their data.
With two days of intensive preconference workshops followed by three days of expert-led sessions, attendees gain hands-on experience and in-depth knowledge across a range of specialized tracks, including,&nbsp;Azure Data Services,&nbsp;SQL Server Optimization &amp; Best Practices,&nbsp;SQL Server Data Solutions for Enterprise,&nbsp;Data Warehousing,&nbsp;Data Integration &amp; Transformation,&nbsp;Power BI &amp; Data Visualization,&nbsp;Microsoft Fabric, and&nbsp;Data Security &amp; Governance.
At DATACON, learning comes from the best in the industry. Our speakers include Microsoft MVPs, Microsoft Certified Masters (MCMs), Microsoft Program Managers, Engineers, MCTs, and Regional Directors—each bringing expert-level insights into Azure SQL Databases, SQL Server, Purview, Power BI, Fabric, and more.
Choose a complete learning track to deepen your expertise or mix and match sessions to fit your organization’s specific needs. Whether you’re focused on building data pipelines, designing dashboards, integrating AI into your workflows, or mastering data governance,&nbsp;DATACON&nbsp;is your destination for actionable insights and transformative learning.

DATACON

Room 323-324

Join us for a workshop designed specifically for Pro Data Modellers. This comprehensive session will guide you through all the critical elements needed to build, tune, and maintain a Direct Lake Model in Microsoft Fabric.

Throughout the workshop, you will delve into essential topics such as:
-Understanding the prerequisites for setting up your model.
-Exploring the anatomy of Parquet files and their role in data storage.
-Mastering transcoding and framing techniques to optimize data processing.
-Implementing SQL fallback strategies for enhanced reliability.
-Discovering new features and how they can benefit your projects.
-Ensuring robust security measures to protect your data.
-Fine-tuning performance to achieve optimal efficiency.
-Navigating the migration process with ease.
-Tackling advanced topics to elevate your modelling skills.

By the end of this workshop, you will have gained the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively manage a Direct Lake Model, ensuring your projects are both efficient and secure.

A Comprehensive Guide to Direct Lake for the Pro Data Modeller 

Transform your data solutions with a streamlined Medallion Architecture using Microsoft Fabric. This session is tailored for professionals familiar with Power BI and basic dataflows, providing a step-by-step guide to implementing Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers for a scalable and maintainable pipeline. Learn how to evolve an unstructured dataflow and semantic model into a comprehensive architecture. Familiarity with Python or SQL is a bonus but not required.

Modules:
• Overview of Medallion Architecture: Gain a clear understanding of Warehouses and Lakehouses, their role within Microsoft Fabric, and how they enable Medallion Architecture.
• Understanding OneLake: Dive into OneLake and explore its foundational storage structure, including Delta tables and Parquet. Understand key features like columnar storage, Delta optimizations, and performance enhancements through simple, no-code explanations.
• Feature Showdown: Compare and contrast key tools in Microsoft Fabric, such as SQL vs. Spark, Notebooks vs. Dataflows vs. Pipelines, and Warehouses vs. Lakehouses, to determine the best fit for your scenarios.
• Well-Designed Architecture & Best Practices:
Learn about GIT integration, monitoring techniques, and actionable best practices for designing scalable and maintainable data architectures.

Labs:
• Build a Lakehouse and create a Medallion Architecture pipeline.
• Extract raw data using Pipelines (Bronze).
• Clean and transform data with Spark Notebooks (Silver).
• Add business logic with T-SQL (Gold).
• Create orchestration and monitor pipelines for optimal performance.
• Bonus Lab: Create and manage a semantic model and integrate it with GIT for version control.

Design a Well-Architected Fabric Solution: A Medallion First Approach

As of November 2023, Microsoft made the announcement that Microsoft Fabric was Generally Available. In the time since, many organizations jumped into the exciting world of this emerging technology.

Any fabric, technical or not, needs to be well maintained to retain its initial quality and usefulness. In the same way, your approach to implementing Microsoft Fabric could either set yourself up for a successful, long-term implementation, or one that needs a rebuild in 1-2 years.

In this session, I'll walk through features of Fabric that have lived up to the hyped labels and work as prescribed. I'll also provide demos challenges I've faced with the product and how I've worked through them. Finally, I'll recommend routine activities that should be performed on any Fabric environment to keep it nice and clean.

(If this wasn't enough Fabric references and you need more, check out this session for even more puns!)

Microsoft Fabric: Lessons from Year 1

Join Patrick Leblanc and Phil Seamark for a deeper dive to discover what makes Direct Lake so fast.  This session will cover important elements of monitoring and optimizing your Fabric data platform to unlock the full potential of Direct Lake, such as how to interpret Delta Analyzer logs and what to look out for if things slow down.

Deep dive into Direct Lake

You will learn best practices, tips and tricks on how to successfully use SQL databases (OnPremise,IaaS, PaaS,SQL Managed Instance) with PowerBI on production environments.

How improve the performance, using for example, Read-Scale,  HyperScale or Synapse, partitioning, ColumnStoreIndexes, Indexed views, etc.. 

How to monitor and diagnostic your database and find out issues with Query Data Store. These learnings are fruit of Microsoft CSS support cases, and customer field engagements.

PowerBI, DirectQuery and SQL Server. It is a good choice?

Managing data across large organizations can feel like an endless game of catch-up. Microsoft Purview and Fabric make it easier by giving teams tools to organize, protect, and share data without constant compliance headaches.

First, we’ll look at the challenges organizations face when data is scattered across silos with possible security gaps slowing everything down and creating possible regulatory concerns. 

Next, we’ll see how Purview and Fabric work together to streamline data management by cataloging assets, enforcing protections, and making data easier to find. 

Finally, we’ll show how this approach simplifies compliance, improves data accessibility, and supports better collaboration across teams.

Attendees will come away with a practical guide on using Microsoft Purview and Fabric to keep data organized, compliant, and useful.

Data Governance with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric gives us a notebook experience unlike any other previous Microsoft product.  The power of notebooks is immense.  Sure you can use data from your Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, or OneLake but what about PYODBC?  Can we connect to a relational database without a Data Pipeline or a Data Flow?  Could we just download a file from Kaggle or Github and start using Data Wrangler?  Could we use Beautiful Soup to scrape data, load it into a Pandas data frame, and begin working with it?  Can we invoke OpenAI models using GPT to glean new insights into our data?  Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes.  Yes we can, and in this session you will learn how to harness the power of Microsoft Fabric Notebooks. 

Harness the Power of Microsoft Fabric and Notebooks

Bringing together diverse health data sources is essential for delivering healthcare solutions. Microsoft Fabric and Azure Health Data Services make it possible to integrate, manage, and analyze this data within a single platform to support patient care, claims processing, provider targeting, and more.

First, we'll explore the challenges in accessing and harmonizing various healthcare data types, highlighting how gaps in information can limit effective claims management, provider targeting, and timely interventions.

Next, we'll dive into how Fabric's advanced analytics capabilities enable the import and transformation of complex health datasets, including claims data and social determinants of health (SDOH).

Finally, we'll cover Azure Health Data Services' tools for securely exporting and managing health data, enhancing patient outreach, and supporting analytics for provider performance and network optimization. We'll see how combining Fabric's analytics with these services supports proactive care management, efficient claims handling, and strategic provider targeting.

Attendees will leave with a clear plan to use Microsoft Fabric and Azure Health Data Services for comprehensive healthcare data integration and analytics, enabling better patient care, improved claims processing, and effective provider engagement.

Microsoft Fabric and Azure Health Data Services

Power BI offers three different storage modes for data: Direct Query, Import and Direct Lake. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, depending on the scenario and the requirements. But which one is the best overall? How do they compare in terms of performance, scalability, flexibility and ease of use?

In this session, we will put the three storage modes to the test in a series of challenges inspired by the Olympic Pentathlon. We will use real-world data sets and scenarios to measure how each storage mode handles different aspects of data analysis and visualization. We will also share some best practices and tips on how to choose the right storage mode for your project.

By the end of this session, you will have a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each storage mode, and you will be able to decide which one deserves the gold medal in your Power BI dashboard.


Power BI Storage Modes: The Ultimate Showdown

For many years, data has been primarily batch loaded from sources on fixed schedules, resulting in operational challenges, outdated data, and delayed insights. The introduction of Lambda architecture aimed to mitigate these issues by accelerating some data processing. Now, with Microsoft Real Time Intelligence, we can easily enhance analytics architecture to easily integrate "hot-path" approaches to make data available faster. 
In this instructional session, we will explore how to integrate event sourcing and other microservices patterns to achieve real-time data integration using Microsoft Fabric. Attendees will learn practical techniques and best practices for implementing these patterns to ensure seamless and efficient data flow.

Supercharge your analytics with Microsoft Fabric Real Time Intelligence

Abstract:
In today's data-driven world, traditional data management approaches often struggle to keep pace with the growing complexity and scale of enterprise data. Enter Data Mesh, a revolutionary paradigm that redefines how organizations handle data. This session will explore the four foundational pillars of Data Mesh architecture: Domain-Oriented Decentralization, Data as a Product, Self-Serve Data Infrastructure, and Federated Computational Governance.

We'll delve into how Domain-Oriented Decentralization empowers teams to own and manage their data, fostering agility and innovation. Discover the concept of Data as a Product, where data is treated with the same rigor and care as any other product, ensuring quality and usability. Learn about Self-Serve Data Infrastructure, which democratizes data access and tooling, enabling teams to work independently and efficiently. Finally, understand the importance of Federated Computational Governance in maintaining security, compliance, and consistency across decentralized data environments.

Join us to gain insights into implementing Data Mesh in your organization, transforming your data strategy, and unlocking the full potential of your data assets.

Harnessing the Power of Data Mesh: A Deep Dive into the Four Pillars of Modern Data Architecture

Discover how to harness the full potential of Fabric to build powerful modern data-driven applications. In this session participants will learn how to use the API for GraphQL and User Data Functions over SQL databases and other data sources in the Microsoft Fabric Platform to build modern “CRUD” (Create, Read Update and Delete) data APIs that you can immediately call from an application. APIs for GraphQL enable you to effortlessly connect your Fabric data with your applications, with only a few clicks. If you have more complex business logic for your data, you can implement it with Python User Data Functions. With these two powerful building blocks and a SaaS-ified, developer-friendly experience, your app will be up and running in no time! 

Roadmap for developers in Fabric: Writing a CRUD App using SQL database, API for GraphQL and User Da

Microsoft Fabric accelerates data potential for the era for AI. Mirroring simplifies linking of external databases into Fabric, with full replicas created with just a couple of clicks. Once a database is mirrored, real-time updates will automatically be replicated into OneLake and stored as Delta Parquet, an analytics-ready format that works seamlessly for every analytics workload in Fabric. Join us to gain deeper insights and learn how to get started with Mirroring by bringing data gravity to unlock powerful insights in Fabric.