FabCon Europe: The sessions I'm looking forward to

As we move ever closer to Fabcon Europe and the speaker sessions get announced more and more, it becomes even more important to plan your few days. With so much crammed in to so few days, it's all to easy to miss a critical session.

With that in mind, here's some of recommendations day by day of sessions I have on my 'must see' list.

Tuesday

• If you've never had hands on time with Microsoft Fabric, get yourself on to the Fabric in a day session. This will take you from knowing nothing to building your first Fabric solution before the day's out.
• For those who have tried Fabric, it will very much depend on your specialism. Personally, I'd be heading to the professional software development on the fabric platform session. It touches some of the more advanced concepts that not many people will have been exposed to yet.

Wednesday

AM

• The keynote is a must. I'm sure we'll see some great product announcements, along with some surprises that aren't on the roadmap already.
• For those starting out on the Fabric road One Year in Fabric should provide loads of great practical advice that will serve you well as you start out.
• For data engineers, Kickstart and Master Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse: From setup to CI/CD should give you great foundation knowledge for starting any PoC's.

PM

• For BDMs have a look Getting started with data governance in Microsoft Fabric and of course come along to Valtech's session on Maximising data impact to start to lift the lid on getting value quickly from the platform.
• For those with current SQL server/Synapse dedicated pools, Migrating from SQL server/Synapse to Data Warehouse in Fabric is going to be a must.
• For current Fabric users, have a look at the Fabric data engineering roadmap.

And don't forget the evening party. It'll be a great opportunity to meet up with speakers and industry contacts whilst having some fun along the way.

Thursday

AM

• Another day, another keynote to kick the day off.
• Transform your Power BI experience with Copilot is going to be a great session for how LLMs can accelerate your productivity.
• Building future-ready platforms with Microsoft Fabric ASAP looks a really interesting session to see a practical example of how organisations are building platforms in Fabric today.

PM

• Direct Lake is such an important tool in combating data duplication and the associated environmental impacts. Deep dive into Direct Lake is a must see for that reason alone, to top it off it will be presented by Guy in a Cube's Patrick Leblac. Definitely one to not miss.
• With the licensing in Fabric being different to other data platforms, if you are still getting to grips with it make sure you attend Understanding Microsoft Fabric Capacities.
• For me CI/CD in Fabric is still a bit of a dark art that isn't easy to setup and get working correctly, given this the session on Taking the Fabric Development Experience to the next level is one I will certainly try to make.

Friday

AM

• Want to hear other customers stories? The last days keynote will have you covered.
• I've seen a few people over on the Reddit community struggling with performance and Fabric data warehouses. This session looks to have all the answers.
• Those starting out on their Fabric journey are finding compliance teams to be the first hurdle they face. This session should give you all the tools you need to get past that point.

PM

• At some stage it is a given that someone will blow up the Fabric capacity. This session should give you some tips to avoid that.
• Undertake BI development? Understanding TMDL is going to be important. This session is going to be worth attending.

What do you think? Any sessions that aren't on the list that are must sees? As always hit up the comments below.