Devon and Cornwall Microsoft Power BI User Group

You've heard about the Direct Lake mode in Microsoft Fabric, and, as a Power BI professional, you are curious to learn what all the fuss is about and how you can leverage this groundbreaking feature in real-life scenarios. How does Direct Lake work under the hood? Is it a replacement for the Import and DirectQuery mode? When and why to use Direct Lake over Import mode? These are just some of the questions that we are going to address in this demo-packed session.

We will dive deep into Direct Lake's architecture, explain its core concepts, and put it in the ultimate 1:1 comparison with the Import mode! We'll examine various concepts and features that are exclusively relevant to Direct Lake, such as how to refresh the data in Direct Lake models, why some columns are hot and some others are not, and many more...

By the end of this session, you'll get not only a deep understanding of Direct Lake internals, but also learn in which scenarios to choose the "Direct Lake path".

A little about Nikola:
I'm making music from the data! Power BI and Microsoft Fabric addict, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Pluralsight Author, O'Reilly Instructor, blogger, speaker...Interested in everything related to data - always eager to extract valuable info from raw data in the most effective way.

Multi-year experience working with (predominantly) Microsoft Data Platform (SQL Server, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, and Power BI). Father of 2 and a true football (and Barca) fan!

The Reality of Fabric Warehouses and Deploying Models using Dbt (Data build tools)

Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's flagship Software-as-a-Service Analytics service combining Power BI, Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, Realtime Analytics, and Machine Learning. Underpinning Fabric is a variety of workloads, engines, and languages to support in building a robust Analytics solution.

Dbt (data build tools) is a data transformation tool that enables data analysts and engineers to transform data in a cloud analytics warehouse. Is is feasible to build a solution on Fabric Warehouses using Dbt? Why would we want to if so? In this session we'll be diving into the integration of Fabric Warehouses and Dbt including Dbt Core and Dbt Cloud.

In this session attendees will understand the use cases of Dbt with Fabric Warehouses and understand the relevant workloads, and crucially the limitations and caveats.

Andy Cutler:
I am an Azure Data Platform professional working predominantly with Azure Synapse Analytics (SQL Pools), Microsoft Fabric, Data Factory, SQL Server and Power BI.

I hold an MSc in Business Intelligence and Data Mining. I am a current Microsoft Data Platform MVP

https://linktr.ee/andycutler

Incremental Refresh is nothing new in Power BI, and if you’ve got a large data model it can really help look after your Power BI environment. But what if your requirements for data refreshing are a bit more bespoke?

What if you need to customise things a little bit? In this talk we’ll look at ways we can leverage the use of the XMLA Endpoint to implement Advanced Partitioning.

Mark has 9 years of experience in the world of data, choosing to hone his skillset in Data Visualisation, Modelling, and all things Power BI, but he can also write a mean SQL query and can talk strategy & culture too.

Mark’s experience was built up working in the Recruitment and Facilities Management industries, before moving into Consultancy just over 3 years ago.

Here he focuses on teaching best practice across both Modelling and Visualisation disciplines and delivering user centric, self-service Power BI deployments at an Enterprise and SME level.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-endicott/

Debug DAX like a Pro

Phil will walk you through the techniques used by the Power BI team when debugging and optimising DAX in large enterprise models. These equally apply for small and medium size models. Come away knowing how to identify and speed up slow running DAX calculations.

Phil Seamark works on the Microsoft Fabric CAT team and is an accomplished database and business intelligence (BI) professional. Phil has an in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft BI stack along with extensive knowledge of data warehouse (DW) methodologies and enterprise data modelling.

Phil has expert knowledge in all facets of BI/DW including planning architecture, project management, dimensional modelling, performance tuning, ETL design, development and optimisation, report and dashboard design as well as installation and administration.

Phil has written several books DAX and Data modelling and has also blogged extensively at dax.tips

https://dax.tips/