After an almost full week of travelling, learning and meeting people, time for a short write up.
Hello Stockholm!
Or even hello Schiphol. When I walked up to the gate, it took the best part of a minute for the first Microsoft person to walk up to me and ask if I was on my way to FabCon (the abbreviation of Microsoft Fabric Conference Europe). And that’s when the first contacts were made. Before I knew it, it was teeming with people on their way to the conference. All happily chatting away and setting the stage for the rest of the week.
After an easy flight and short wait for luggage, on to the fast train to the city centre. I really love that place, it has a way more relaxed vibe than any of the Dutch cities I regularly visit or even my home town. I know that as a tourist or visitor, everything seems much nicer but still, it just feels good being there.
Check-in done and time for a short walk before the first event of the week.
Swedish PowerBI Meetup
The meet-up was hosted at Zington, a consultancy company in Sweden. The welcoming people let us fill up the rooms, provided ample food and drinks whilst Jon Vöge really impressed with his session on Fabric. Keep an eye on him, he’s going places. After the dinner break it was time for a panel discussion. We had some fun, laughs and small mockery of products. You can’t blame a techy DBA for keeping away from PowerBI, right?
The meet-up done, we had a lovely walk back to the hotel; it was nice and warm, unusual for Sweden I was told. How that would change during the week!
Pre conference day; MVP day
This is the day all the MVP’s gather, meet, greet and enjoy coffee, tea, water and snacks together. As it’s organised by Rie and Kelly, it ran as smooth as one would expect. I can’t share what we talked about (what happened in K.11 stays in K.11) but a number of announcements came out the next day.
For me, there were a number of highlights regarding the road map, but also meeting Ye Xu in real life, a Microsoft person whom I’ve been in contact with a lot regarding the Fabric Copy Job and the fast copy option for Dataflow Gen2. Even though I’m an introvert, meeting people at events like this energise like nothing else.
The day ended with a noisy food and drink party in the conference hall where my energy slowly drowned to 0.
Main conference
After a short night of sleep it was time for the first conference day. Not only the day with the main announcements in the key note, but also the day I got to present my own session.
During the key note, I shared the news that struck me most or has the most impact on my work. As my main focus lies on data engineering, these are the things In was looking forward to the most. The fun part of that is that there were a lot of tweets about other announcements like PowerBI Darkmode and realtime stuff. I know these are important but I’ve realised that I can’t keep up with the entire breadth of Fabric.
My favourite announcements:
Fast Copy for Dataflow Gen2 went GA: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-general-availability-of-fast-copy-in-dataflows-gen2?ft=All
Fabric now supported by Terraform: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-new-terraform-provider-for-microsoft-fabric-public-preview?ft=All
Fabric Data pipeline support for the On-Premises data gateway: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/14332?ft=All
Coming soon, improvements on the Fabric SKU Calculator: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-private-preview-of-the-microsoft-fabric-capacity-calculator-at-fabcon-eu?ft=All
High concurrency for Notebooks in Pipelines: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-high-concurrency-mode-for-notebooks-in-pipelines-for-fabric-spark?ft=All
T-SQL Notebooks! https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-public-preview-of-t-sql-notebook-in-fabric?ft=All
My absolute favorite; the Copy Job activity (personal blog published last week: https://sqlreitse.com/2024/09/25/microsoft-fabric-copy-job-simplifying-data-ingestion/ ): https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-public-preview-copy-job-in-microsoft-fabric?ft=All
Dataflow Gen2 Incremental refreshes: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-public-preview-incremental-refresh-in-dataflows-gen2?ft=All
All the announcements can be read here: https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-US/blog/
After the Key note, I headed back to the speaker room to prepare for my session. And for the first time in a few years, I got really nervous. More than the regular level I need to perform. It wasn’t crippling but it wasn’t fun either.
I got quite a large room that didn’t really fill up. I haven’t seen the feedback yet but I tried to project as much energy as I could to the 40ish attendees scattered around the room. I can only hope it worked. The session went OK, and I had some surprises with the live demos as some improvements had gone live without me realising it.
This meant that a few demos that were supposed to fail, didn’t. In a way a good thing as system queries around index usage suddenly returned valid results. And it meant I have a lot more testing to do to find out what else is working now. I’ve you’re following my blog closely, you will have read my blog series on Azure Sql Copilot.
Session done, it took quite some time to return to normal. Usually it takes somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes to resume normal operation, that day it took more than 2 hours. This meant leaving the venue for lunch as they had already run out, relaxing in the quiet speaker room and in general chatting with a few, calm people.
The end of the day I went to an amazing session by Traci Sewell. She presented her session on how to help people who struggle mentally. A long and interesting session short: Shut the F up and listen. To add a little context; ask a person if they want to be listened to or want advice. Sometimes a human just needs to vent, your role will be to shut up and listen.
It is one of the few times I didn’t mind that a session ran over.
Sessions done, a few people went out for dinner (I was allowed to join) and after a quick change of to the Stockholm city hall for drinks. It turned out to be the main hall where the Nobel prizes are awarded and we even got the privilege to walk in the special dining room above it. A truly magnificent experience with the mosaic from floor to and including ceiling. We felt quite small in that hall with so much history portrayed, even though the hall itself is only 100 years old.
Second day
Having no longer to stress about a session, more time to enjoy the conference and put in community hours. From being at the Ask the Expert booths helping people find the correct place to ask their question(s) (most were about capacity management) to being in the community zone answering random questions about the community and being an MVP.
After some quiet time it was time for the Microsoft session on Azure SQL Copilot, presented by Joe Sack and Bob Ward. A great session showing of the powers of this Copilot from a different perspective. And as always, meeting the great like them is always a pleasure.
After the session, we were kicked out because preparations for the infamous Power Hour had to commence. This session is like nothing you will ever encounter. Hosted by metalhead Mathew Roche (also known for his work on SSBIPolar) a slew of presenters came on stage doing their thing, making us laugh and no leaning was done. Swag was caught though.
Power hour over, we had the option to go to a large dinner. With many people in a relatively small room making a lot of noise, a small group decided to stop hammering our brain and find a quiet place for dinner. I mentioned before that the weather was quite nice. Well, it stopped being nice and started to be very wet. Not everyone was prepared with a water resistant jacket or umbrella. It took some time to find a nice place where we could eat. It was still raining quite a lot and the water seemed to fall of the roof onto the street. So far this went as planned. What wasn’t planned was the lack of foundation of the place we were at. This resulted in a floor switching from dry to moist to river. Luckily someone was paying attention and warned us before we’d have to run of and fetch our bags somewhere downstream. Abiding Roche’s maxim of data transformation, keep as much as you can upstream. Including your bags and other belongings.
Final day
There was one more day to go. I went to a few sessions but mostly, again, had chats in the main hall and community zone. One of the things I’ve noticed in my work is that you don’t have to know everything, as long as you know the specialists; the people who are the experts in some or other technology. This day also showed that a lot of people were preparing to leave; suitcases everywhere and a steady stream heading to the nearby railway station (ignoring all the begging cries of the taxi drivers).
At the end of the day, a quick dinner with a few kind MVP friends and then off to the airport. 2 hours flying, 1 hour 40 minutes driving later and I was at home. A little after one in the morning. Tired but very happy.
Concluding
Should you go? Oh yes you should! Either the Las Vegas edition next year in march or the Vienna edition next year in september. You won’t go wrong either way, learn a lot and with any luck meet a lot of Microsoft people actively working on the project.
I know I’ll be there in september again!
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