Rob Sewell
Chief Data Officer - Beard Twizzler
Exeter, United Kingdom
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Rob was a SQL Server DBA with a passion for PowerShell, Azure, Automation, and SQL (PaaS geddit?). Now he just helps people make things. He is a Data Platform MVP and an Azure MVP, a PowerShell Conference Europe organiser, and maintainer of many open-source projects. He has spoken at and volunteered at many Data and PowerShell events all over the world. He is a proud supporter of the Data and PowerShell communities.
He relishes sharing and learning and can be found doing both via Social Medias and his blog. He spends most of his time looking at a screen and loves to solve problems. He knows that looking at a screen so much is bad for him because his wife tells him so. Thus, he is often out riding his bike as his eyes are not good enough to play cricket any more.
He has a fabulous beard
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Microsoft Fabric for the PowerShell Pro
Have you heard the data folks in your organization talking about Microsoft Fabric? Or perhaps you administer the Azure environment and you’ve noticed a (big) new line item on the bill?
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end data analytics platform that integrates data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, and AI into a unified environment. Now that's a lot of buzzwords! This session will not only explain ‘What is Microsoft Fabric?’, but also demonstrate some ways in which developers can interact and use Fabric.
Join us as we not only demonstrate how to use PowerShell to perform Fabric administration tasks such as spinning up a new workspace, creating and using restore points, and getting a list of data pipelines.
But also use Fabric as the destination of data collected by some of our favourite PowerShell tools. We’ll take data generated by dbatools and dbachecks and persist it in our Fabric environment for analysis.
MicrosoftFabricMgmt - The PowerShell module to rule Fabric
Stop clicking-start scripting! Join Rob and Jess to explore MicrosoftFabricMgmt, an open-source PowerShell module with 295+ cmdlets spanning 48 Fabric resource types. Learn to automate workspace provisioning, lakehouse deployments, real-time analytics, and tenant governance from the command line. Discover flexible authentication for CI/CD pipelines, smart caching that slashes lookup times, and enterprise-grade logging built in. Leave ready to automate your entire Fabric environments from Monday.
Using the fabric-toolbox MicrosoftFabricMgmt PowerShell Module for automation
Learn to install, authenticate, create and manage Fabric workloads with familiar PowerShell tooling.
MicrosoftFabricMgmt is a community open-source PowerShell module for Microsoft Fabric with dbatools-style ease, repeatability and robust error handling to automate Fabric administration tasks.
What A Data Nerd Learnt by Automating Their Home (Besides Annoying Their Family)
Modern data teams spend their days designing pipelines, modelling schemas, and wrestling with requirements — but what happens when those same skills escape the office and take over your home?
Learn how tinkering at home teaches lessons about requirements, error handling, resilience, scope creep, and communication — and how those lessons flow back into your day job (but in a fun way) We'll even include some Microsoft Fabric.
You will see how a simple “let’s automate a light switch” experiment spiralled into a full‑blown, event‑driven, high‑availability, occasionally‑over‑engineered home automation ecosystem. A house that thinks for itself.
No home automation experience is required — just curiosity and a willingness to laugh at the familiar chaos of scope creep.
We’ll look at how personal tinkering projects become powerful learning tools: how designing a reliable smart‑home workflow mirrors building production‑grade data systems; how debugging flaky sensors teaches you more about error handling than any textbook; and how “disaster recovery” takes on new meaning when your heating system depends on your YAML being valid.
Along the way, we’ll explore the two‑way learning loop between home and work: how professional practices improve your home automations, and how home automations sharpen your professional instincts.
You’ll leave with new ideas, a few cautionary tales, and a renewed appreciation for how fun, messy, and surprisingly educational side projects can be. Whether you’re building a data platform or just trying to stop your lights from turning off while you’re in the shower.
What is fabric-toolbox and why should I care?
The fabric-toolbox is Microsoft's growing open-source repository of accelerators, tools, and scripts built to solve real Fabric challenges. In this session we'll tour the toolbox — from FUAM, the Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring solution that gives you deep tenant visibility beyond the 14-day Capacity Metrics limit, to FCA for FinOps cost analysis, DAX performance testing, Semantic Model auditing, Data Factory migration assistance, and the MicrosoftFabricMgmt PowerShell module with 295+ cmdlets covering 48 resource types. Whether you're an admin, developer, or architect, there's something here for you. Leave knowing exactly which tools to reach for and how to get started.
Azure SQL or Fabric SQL: Deploying Infrastructure and Databases as Code
Managing Azure SQL or Fabric SQL by hand doesn't scale. In this workshop, Jess Pomfret and Rob Sewell show you how to deploy both your Azure SQL infrastructure and your database schemas as code. You'll build real CI/CD pipelines that provision resources and ship database changes automatically — version controlled, repeatable, and ready for production. Hands-on, practical, and no clicking required.
Think PowerShell and SQL is meh? Meet dbatools!
Come and join one of the creators of the most popular SQL Server open source PowerShell module and learn how we have used blog posts from many of the SQL community as inspiration for over 900 million* commands written by over 4tn* contributors.
Let me show you how easy it is to use PowerShell to accomplish many everyday tasks straight from the command line with the community developed module dbatools.
I will even demonstrate in containers using Jupyter Notebooks that you can try out for yourself on your own machine.
Afraid of PowerShell?
Worried its too complicated?
Don't want to go through the learning curve?
Let me show you with plenty of demos how easy and straight forward it can be and I will save you time starting Monday
Want to restore an entire servers databases to the latest available point in time of the backups in just one line?
Be useful to know the Last DBCC Check for your entire estate in only one line of code?
Need to test your restores but it's complicated?
and many many more
All this in a fast-paced, fun session
* Some numbers may have been exaggerated
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Rob Sewell
Chief Data Officer - Beard Twizzler
Exeter, United Kingdom
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