Using Power BI with Lots of Data

Can we use Power to deal with real-time data sources, very large tables, and transactional details? Yes, but it requires some planning and proper design. Out of the box, Power BI is super-fast with moderate data volumes and data schemas optimized for analytic reporting. How big is your data? Millions or billions of rows? Gigabytes or terabytes? - we can handle that.
Moving beyond the basics, learn to use DirectQuery alongside in-memory Import mode in composite models to access very large tables with real-time results; models and reports that combine interactive "dashboard-style" reports and drill-through to transactional details. Take a journey and learn to use the Power BI platform to achieve the best of both worlds: performance and scale.

Architecting Fabric Analytic Solutions: What have we learned after 100 Fabric projects?

Working with several consulting clients, what best practices have emerged? Architecting enterprise scale projects, developing data engineering solutions; designing lakehouses, warehouses and large semantic models at-scale, let's talk about what we have learned - from our experience and the industry at large?
Fabric is amazing and will only improve but what gotchas, pitfalls and mistakes should you prepared to avoid?

How can you estimate workloads and plan for capacity? Should you use pipelines, notebooks or dataflows? How should you implement a medallion architecture using lakehouses or warehouses? What's the right option to manage version control, release control and DevOps? What about data governance, security and data quality control?

Learn from the experience of many others to get started on the right foot and make sure our organization is prepared and ready for success.

Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Enterprise Adoption Roadmap

Join us for an intensive 8-hour session designed specifically for Business Intelligence professionals overseeing Microsoft Fabric environments. This session will provide a comprehensive roadmap for adopting Microsoft Fabric, focusing on strategic and tactical considerations essential for successful implementation and fostering a robust data culture within your organization.

Session take-aways:
- The session includes live demonstrations, showing you how to apply these critical practices.
- Guided Fabric maturity readiness assessment for your team and organization, used to plan your Fabric adoption.
- Resources and prescriptive guidance to create a Fabric adoption roadmap & architecture tailored for your organization.

Key Objectives:
- Understand the critical steps and action items for Microsoft Fabric adoption.
- Explore the interplay between people, processes, and technology in building a data-driven culture.
- Gain insights into effective content management, security protocols, user enablement strategies, system oversight, and data governance.

Topics Covered:
Content Management: Best practices for organizing and maintaining data assets.

Security: Strategies to ensure data protection and compliance.
User Enablement: Techniques to empower users and drive engagement.

System Oversight: Methods for monitoring and managing Fabric environments.

Data Governance: Frameworks for maintaining data integrity and quality.

Data Culture: Approaches to cultivate a culture that values and utilizes data effectively.

This session is tailored to equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to lead your organization through the successful adoption of Microsoft Fabric, ultimately driving impactful business outcomes.

Power BI for Enterprise Solutions Workshop

This full-day workshop session will provide participants with essential best practice knowledge and practical tools to begin designing enterprise-ready solutions with Power BI. We will design a report, but this session will primarily focus on enterprise data modeling and dataset delivery for reporting & analytics.

Focus:
• Overcoming challenges with data at-scale
• Meeting the needs of data governance, business buy-in and ownership
• Addressing challenges with DevOps, code sharing and multi-developer projects
• Futureproofing Power BI solutions for business, data and user audience growth
• Delivering an enterprise Power BI solution using a best practice checklist
• So many features! OMG, let’s focus on the essentials!

Bring your laptop and together, we will design a business-ready solution, including:
• Fundamental data modeling
• Transformation basics & guidelines
• Designing and building performant queries for data at-scale
• Using parameters to manage source changes and environments
• Naming conventions, annotations, and documentation
• DAX essentials & building blocks
• Deployment planning
• Keeping it real – balancing “ideal” DevOps and realistic BI delivery
• Right-sizing data models for flexibility & expanding requirements

We will also discuss and demonstrate some advanced topics, including:
• When and how to consider using composite models
• Calculation groups – the key to flexible calculations

Laptop requirements:
• Windows 10 or 11
• 8 GB of RAM minumum
• Wifi ready
• Permission to install software from Windows Store & USB drive (if a company-issued machine)
• Latest version of Power BI Desktop

Power BI Paginated Reports: the New Old Operational Reporting Platform

Power BI Paginated Reports (aka SQL Server Reporting Services) was old but now it's new again. Available on-premises or in the Power BI service with flexible licensing, you have multiple options to implement operational reports. This session will briefly cover the differences between analytic and operational reports; and help you understand the advantages and trade-offs using Power BI Paginated Reports, Power BI Report Server and SQL Server Reporting Services. Material from our forthcoming book: Paginated Report Recipes.

Fabric & Power BI Hands-on Workshop: Start to Finish

In this full-day session, we will build a complete, end to end analytic reporting solution in Microsoft Fabric using lakehouse medallion architecture. You will learn the basics with notebooks, dataflows and pipelines. You will need your Windows laptop, a Fabric trial or any F capacity with a Power BI Pro license.
Attendees should have prior experience using Power BI.

Laptop requirements:
• Windows 10 or 11
• 8 GB of RAM minumum
• Wifi ready
• Permission to install software from Windows Store & USB drive (if a company-issued machine)
• Latest version of Power BI Desktop

Fabric Patterns: Architecting solutions at any scale

This session explores using scalable patterns for data engineering and analytic solutions with Fabric. Apply small, medium and large patterns using medallion architecture, CI/CD, deployment strategies and data-driven ETL to support developers and business users.

Futureproofing Power BI Solutions

When starting a Power BI project, you have many choices to make. Decisions like how to source your data, where and how to create queries to cleanse, transform and reshape the data; where and how to create calculations and the nuances of modeling are just the tip of the iceberg. Learn how to prototype and use proof-of-concept projects to right-size a project and plan for a successful and enduring solution.

You will learn best practices and prescriptive guidance for:

Managing source data

Planning for data volume

Power Query design practices

Data loading and refresh management

Data modeling

Presenting information and delivering reports

Enterprise BI with Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Power BI is not just for self-service reporting. It is a highly scalable data analytics platform that can handle large volumes of data at scale to create analytical and operational reports. Fabric takes Power BI next-level with Direct Lake and Gen2 Dataflows. This session will demonstrate Power BI for the enterprise and help you plan and design solutions with interactive, fast data refresh, and even real-time reporting for the entire business. Take a journey and learn to use the Power BI with Fabric to achieve the best of both worlds: performance and scale.
Can we use Power to deal with real-time data sources, very large tables, and transactional details? Yes, but it requires some planning and proper design. Out of the box, Power BI is super-fast with moderate data volumes and data schemas optimized for analytic reporting. How big is your data? Millions or billions of rows? Gigabytes or terabytes? - we can handle that.
Moving beyond the basics, learn to use Direct Lake, Import and DirectQuery mode to access very large tables with real-time results; models and reports that combine interactive "dashboard-style" reports and drill-through to transactional details.

DAX is Easy ...until it isn't. DAX Basics for Beginners.

The DAX calculation language is powerful but can be puzzling, and is a mystery to many people. To get the most from Power BI, you must understand the mechanics of DAX so you can create measures and calculations. Using Excel to get started in familiar territory, this beginner-level session will cover the essential concepts and help you understand how to build your own DAX skills to use in Power BI.
Through simple, relevant demonstrations, we will cover:
- Calculated columns & measures
- Row and Filter Context
- Aggregator functions and Iterator functions
- Filter & Table functions
- Building financial measures
- Applying time-intelligence
- Reading, annotating & formatting your DAX
- Variable basics

Tales from the Trenches: Lessons from Big Power BI Projects

From our experience managing hundreds of small, medium and massive Power BI projects at 3Cloud, I will showcase:
- Successful design patterns that always work
- Silly things that clients want to do
- Lessons learned from mistakes in the past
- Planning for the future and improving successful outcomes

Reporting & Modeling with a Lot of Data Using Power BI and Fabric

Power BI is not just for self-service reporting. It is a highly scalable data analytics platform that can handle large volumes of data at scale to create analytical and operational reports. Fabric takes Power BI next-level with Direct Lake and Gen2 Dataflows. This session will demonstrate Power BI for the enterprise and help you plan and design solutions with interactive, fast data refresh, and even real-time reporting for the entire business. Take a journey and learn to use the Power BI with Fabric to achieve the best of both worlds: performance and scale.
Can we use Power to deal with real-time data sources, very large tables, and transactional details? Yes, but it requires some planning and proper design. Out of the box, Power BI is super-fast with moderate data volumes and data schemas optimized for analytic reporting. How big is your data? Millions or billions of rows? Gigabytes or terabytes? - we can handle that.

Moving beyond the basics, learn to use Direct Lake, and DirectQuery alongside in-memory Import mode in composite models to access very large tables with real-time results; models and reports that combine interactive "dashboard-style" reports and drill-through to transactional details.

Pack your bags, Power BI. We're moving to Fabric!

Wait… when did Power BI become Fabric?
What’s changed, what hasn’t, and what do you need to do about it?

Microsoft Fabric extends Power BI into a unified analytics platform, shifting from report-centric BI to a well-architected, Fabric-native analytics solution—but it doesn’t replace your existing skills. The question is: where should your logic live now?

Do you need to change anything?
How do you move transformations upstream to reduce cost and eliminate duplication?
How do you establish a single, governed version of the truth?

Using your existing Power Query and data modeling expertise, this session shows how to:
- Migrate Power BI solutions to Dataflows Gen2
- Build and migrate Direct Lake semantic models optimized for performance.
- Prepare your models for AI-driven experiences for Copilot to enable natural language interaction so users can visualize and chat with governed data.

Attendees should have some experience with Power BI and the Power BI service. No prior Fabric experience is needed.

Doing Power BI The Right Way For SQL Database Developers

From the perspective of a DBA and database professional, this session will provide prescriptive guidance to plan and build an enterprise BI solution correctly using best practice design. The mindsets of self-service BI and database development are often different, so using common language and a best-of-breed approach is a crucial step for designing futureproof BI solutions, and “doing Power BI the right way”.
Based on 25 years of industry experience and hundreds of durable Power BI solutions, you will see how to create and maintain analytic reporting projects supporting data governance, self-service reporting; and agile, iterative development practices.

Semantic Model Design & Prep for Humans and Robots

Conversational analytics is here! Optimize Power BI semantic models for self-service, data agents, and Copilot by applying proven data modeling best practices and preparing data for AI. Enhance models with verified answers and data agent instructions to improve usability, trust, and accuracy. Through practical demonstrations, see how users can chat with data, generate visuals, and get consistent, reliable answers—enabling AI-driven insights, improving decision-making, and transforming Power BI into a true Power AI platform for modern analytics.

Introducing SQL Database for Fabric and SQL database tools

How does SQL Database for Fabric fit into the Fabric picture? When should you use a lakehouse, a warehouse, KQL database?
As a SQL Server DBA or TSQL developer, learn to query, manage and optimize Fabric lakehouses, warehouses and SQL databases. Discover how Fabric can be the next step for you and your organization using existing skills. See how to use familiar SQL Server tools like SSMS to connect and harness the massive power, convenience and flexibility of Microsoft Fabric.

100-200 level intro for attendees with some SQL and Fabric experience. Not a deep dive.

You should be a Model & I will be Your Agent

Enable agentic chat with your business data using Microsoft Fabric data agents, Copilot, and Power BI semantic models. Agents provide the grounding and context for AI-driven reporting—but how do you ensure accuracy and confidence?

In this session, learn how to optimize semantic models and author effective agent instructions to produce reliable, verifiable results. Through realistic demos and proven patterns, we’ll show how to validate AI-generated answers, reinforce trust, apply governance controls, and operationalize agentic analytics at scale.

This demonstration-centered presentation covers model preparation basics and Fabric data agent design, with examples to show how correct model design, preparation and instructions improve agentic chat using Copilot.