Getting Started with Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric

Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric is designed to enable organisations to bring their streaming, high-granularity, time-sensitive event data into Fabric and build various analytical, visual and action-oriented data applications and experiences.

In this session, you will learn about the various components of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence through a full end-to-end solution which will show you how to ingest, analyze and visualize real-time streaming data in Fabric.

We will discuss the various streaming sources (and clouds) that you can connect to with the Real-Time Hub, and explore best practice when it comes to cleaning and preparing this data for superior query times.

You’ll be introduced to the Kusto Query Language, with live demonstrations of queries on sample real-time data, covering syntax, built-in functions, and operators, and all the key features of KQL that make it a game-changer for analysis of data in motion.

We’ll also explore Real-Time Dashboards by building powerful live visuals, as well as covering how to connect Power BI to our streaming data in Fabric and best optimise our reports. Lastly, we’ll demonstrate how you can take your visuals from your reports and dashboards to the next level by building alerts and rules with Activator to efficiently and pro-actively manage your data and Fabric estate.

You will leave this session equipped with practical examples and best practices for real-time data analysis to deliver instant value on your streaming data.

Database Watcher: Figure Out What's Wrong and Fix It Fast

When it comes to performance monitoring and optimization across the Azure SQL family, everyone has their own preferred routines. Whether it's using dynamic management views and extended events, digging through Query Store, or looking at Azure Metrics, the goal is always the same: figure out what's going on and fix it fast.

You may not have heard of Database Watcher, but it's worth spending an hour having a look at a native Microsoft tool for monitoring your databases. That means you don't have to ask your boss for yet another license for yet another tool! Join us in this demo-rich session to understand how you can finally manage Azure SQL at scale with minimal setup and overhead..

You'll learn what Database Watcher offers out-of-the-box in terms of insights, alerts, and reports. We'll also show how you can start to analyze the performance data stored by Database Watcher with T-SQL or Kusto Query Language (KQL) and then visualize that data with your own custom visuals and dashboards in Power BI and Real-Time Dashboards in Fabric.

By the end of this session, you'll understand how quick and cost-effective Database Watcher can be to help you save time, reduce guesswork, and work smarter (not harder).

Change Data Capture Made Easy With Microsoft Fabric

Change Data Capture (CDC) is an efficient method to keep your data integrations up-to-date, performant and cost-effective. Instead of reloading your entire dataset, you simply capture any inserts, updates and deletes in your source data.

While Azure Data Factory and other PaaS solutions already offer CDC capabilities, Fabric takes this to the next level, allowing you to set up CDC for a wide range of sources and automatically transform and manipulate this data without lifting a finger.

In this session we’ll cover how effortless it is to set up sources and catalogue them as streams in the Real-Time Hub, your one-stop CDC shop in Fabric. From here we’ll discuss how we can work with this data across all of Fabric’s experiences, and use this data to trigger other actions and alerts using Data Activator on fresh, hot-off-the-press data entering your estate.

Come along to this session if you’re a data engineer or developer dreaming of a world where your data’s always up to date and every downstream process triggers itself. You’ll leave with all the knowledge you’ll ever need to make your Fabric capacity take care of all things CDC!

The Sixth Sense: Using Log Analytics to Efficiently Monitor Your Azure Environment

Log Analytics sees all, knows all, and is an ever-present help in any Azure environment. Azure Monitor logs and diagnostics can be collected from almost any Azure resource you could ever think of, and can help offer powerful insights on the performance metrics of your resources, keep track of changes and deployments in your environment and more!

This session will cover the benefits and capabilities of Log Analytics and the underlying Kusto engine, and how you can interactively analyse your logs and metrics using the Kusto Query Language (KQL), with demonstrations of how you can visualise resource usage over time, spot anomalies and trends and configure alerting that could be crucial to keeping your business-critical resources up and running. You'll have a better understanding of how you can optimise your Azure usage to manage and monitor your environment more efficiently.

Moneyball: How Data and AI have Revolutionised Analytics in Sports

Data analytics and statistics have not only served as the basis for blockbuster sports dramas but as a key factor in how top teams and athletes in competitive sports dominate the field. Data can assist in making key decisions in real-time, identifying performance gains, tracking an athlete's physical condition, and helping fans engage more with powerful insights.

This session will explore the current level of data analytics in top-level sports such as football, Formula 1, and more, giving you an introductory overview and examples of how tools like Kusto (KQL) and PowerBI can be used to ingest, analyse, and visualise sample sports data in real-time. You'll gain a better understanding of how Microsoft Fabric and Azure's wider data analytics offerings can be leveraged to get the most out of telemetry logs and IoT data for different business use cases.

Join me if you're passionate about data, a sports enthusiast wanting to gain better insights, or even better: both!

Target audience: fans of sports, data, and data in sports.