My first time at SQL Saturday New York City was an absolute blast! Thank you so much to the organizers and the incredible people who chatted with me during and after the event, the people always make these events worth the trip. Here’s the link to the event, feel free to connect with speakers that you wish you would have been able to hear from! You never know, they may give the talk near you sometime! https://sqlsaturday.com/2025-05-10-sqlsaturday1105/
My Session – Mastering Microsoft Fabric Data Warehousing: Tips & Tricks You Need to Know
Thank you so much to everyone who came to my session! I need to do some more tongue twisters to not mix up Warehouse and Workspace when I do this talk in the future but thank you all for laughing with me. There were some incredible questions and comments, and I loved the conversations that came from this session. This was my first time giving this session, so please feel free to reach out with any feedback you may have, I love evolving my sessions to be more useful to everyone who attends.
Here’s a link to my GitHub that has all the slides, monitoring scripts, and Power BI report used to monitor the queries: https://github.com/Anytsirk12/DataOnWheels/tree/main/2025%20Presentations/2025%20SQL%20Saturday%20NYC
Women in Technology Panel
This was also my first time speaking on a Women in Tech (WIT) panel! It was incredible to sit up there with some extremely talented women and discuss what “Dangerous Phrases” in business impact us and others in the community. The discussion was electric, and I loved hearing all the varying experiences we’ve had and discussion on how we can grow together to make an even brighter future. Can’t wait for the day when there’s so many qualified, incredible women speakers that we have lines in the rest room and a panel with all the women speakers at an event isn’t possible. For context, this event had 35 wonderful speakers, 6 of which were women (17%).
John Miner – Create an analytics foundation using Fabric Warehouse
GitHub link= https://github.com/JohnMiner3/community-work/tree/master/analytics-foundation-fabric-warehouse
Don’t be afraid to use GenAI to help rewrite scripts to be compliant with Fabric.
Definitely look at the make metadata notebook TSQL notebook, great structures to replicate when building a metadata driven approach. Even covers building a log for your ETL process! Super neat.
Paul Turley – Moving from Power BI to Microsoft Fabric
Slides: https://sqlserverbi.blog/presentations
With Fabric, you now have the option to push elements of BI upstream. Medallion architecture is a common way we move data from ingestion to cleaned up and ready for reporting.
Semantic modeling options
- Vertipaq (import mode)
- In-memory cache
- refreshed
- column store/compression
- internal storage optimization is done with various formats of encoding
- Direct lake
- Optimized for Fabric lakehouse storage
- similar characteristics to vertipaq
- in-memory based on column use
- compressed in parquet
- data available within seconds of updates
- v2 direct lake limitations will be eliminated in late 2025 – database views, calculated columns, mixed storage mode
- Direct query
- pass through to/from source
- reads directly from the data source
- DAX query generated by report and translated to source native query language
- no model data on disk
- no data cached in memory
- no compression
- row size limits
- significantly slower in visuals
Don’t freak out, you don’t HAVE to change anything. You just have more options now.
Enterprise Principles:
- Governance is king: ownership, business & IT
- Traceability from source to semantic model & report – defendable numbers
- endorsement & certs
- scalable – storage, transformation, modeling, visual presentation
- version control
- continuous delivery
- deployment
Version control – moving from Power BI to Fabric isn’t about what you have to do, but what you git to do lol
What do I have to do with Fabric?
- Replace PBI Premium capacities with Fabric capacities
- consider fabric data engineering patterns in the future
That’s it! You have more opportunities, but that’s all you HAVE to do.
