Alessandro Gherardi
Business Intelligence Freelance Developer
Bologna, Italy
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6+ years of experience working in Business Intelligence in different contexts: startup/scaleup, Big 4 consultancy firm, remote contractor for US-based tech company and as Community Leader for the Italian Power BI User Group. Currently working as a freelance consultant with customers ranging from small-sized shops to multinational corporations. I am strongly experienced in BI development, working daily to solve tasks related to Data Engineering, ETL, SQL and Power BI/SSAS development.
I am among the co-leaders of the Power BI User Group Italy, the biggest Italian community dedicated to BI and Data. For the community I manage and grow social channels, organize events all over Italy (and beyond! We regularly travel to Switzerland for our Ticino Conference) and present technical sessions. If you wish to join any of the social channels of the community, here's a useful LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/powerbiusergroupitaly.
Certified on Power BI (PL-300) and Fabric (DP-600 | DP-700)
Area of Expertise
Topics
DevOps for Power BI: ensuring best practices compliance with Tabular Editor and PBI Inspector
Ensuring development consistency across Power BI models and reports is no small task. Following best practices and coding conventions often depends on each developer’s discipline and attention to detail, which often leads to inconsistencies over time. Fortunately, there is a more scalable and automated way to enforce standards.
In this session, I will demonstrate why and how to leverage Tabular Editor’s Best Practice Analyzer and PBI Inspector within an Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline to automate and scale best-practice compliance across your organization when developing tabular models and Power BI reports.
The session will consist of two parts:
The What and the Why: An overview of the tools, the CI/CD concept, and the benefits of integrating these practices into a Power BI/SSAS development workflow.
Demo: A hands-on demonstration showing a simple example of how to implement these tools within an Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline.
Required knowledge: Power BI development experience, some basic DevOps knowledge is nice to have
DirectQuery in Power BI: Trade-offs, Limitations, and Best Practices
Power BI's DirectQuery mode is a powerful feature that lets you query your data directly in the source database, removing the need to transfer the data to Power BI's VertiPaq database (Import Mode), which can sometimes be a lengthy and error-prone process. Sounds great, doesn't it? However, no technology comes without costs and limitations.
In this session, I will share the considerations you need to make when using DirectQuery for your Power BI architecture. We will see how it will impact you as a developer, with some features being unavailable and DAX code needing to be rewritten. We will also look at how it will impact your report consumers, especially in self-service BI scenarios.
I decided to write this session after an unsuccessful VertiPaq-to-DirectQuery migration project, so I will add personal, real-world experience to the technical analysis you can find in books. After the session, you will have a solid understanding of the pros and cons of DirectQuery in Power BI and a clear sense of when to use this additional tool in your Power BI developer toolbox.
Power BI development experience, especially in writing DAX code, is strongly recommended to benefit from this session.
Cloud Tech Tallinn 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
SQL Start! 2025 Sessionize Event
Microsoft Fabric User Group Denmark - 2024/2025 User group Sessionize Event
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