Sam Debruyn
Microsoft Data Platform MVP, cloud & data platform architect
Heist-op-den-Berg, Belgium
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Sam Debruyn is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Cloud & Data Platform Architect passionate about modern data platforms such as Microsoft Fabric. In his day-to-day, he designs and implements data platforms that support customers in harvesting the full potential of their data. Sam has over 10 years of experience with Microsoft Azure and often blogs about his adventures in data. He contributes to the data community through blog posts, open-source projects, and speaking engagements at data meetups and conferences.
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dbt deep-dive: beyond your first models
Already comfortable with dbt basics? This workshop is where your skills get serious. Designed for practicing analytics engineers and data engineers who have moved past the fundamentals, this session explores the more powerful and often underused features of dbt that separate good pipelines from great ones.
Over the course of the workshop, you'll tackle incremental models and snapshots for handling large and slowly changing data, write custom and unit tests for bulletproof pipelines, and explore Python models for when SQL isn't enough. You'll also dig into debugging strategies, discover the most valuable packages in the dbt ecosystem, and even learn how to build and publish your own. This workshop pairs perfectly with the morning fundamentals session, but any practitioner with solid dbt experience will find it immediately applicable to their day-to-day work.
dbt fundamentals: an introduction to dbt in 2026
New to dbt? This hands-on workshop is your launchpad. Starting from scratch, you'll set up your first dbt project using dbt Cloud and Snowflake trial accounts, no prior setup required. By the end of the session, you'll understand what dbt is, why it has become the backbone of modern analytics engineering, and how it fits into the broader data transformation landscape.
You'll work through the core building blocks of dbt: models, sources, seeds, and Jinja templating, before moving into macros, documentation, and testing. Every concept is reinforced with practical exercises, so you leave with working code. Whether you're a data analyst or an engineer stepping into the analytics space, this workshop gives you the foundation to hit the ground running on your first real dbt project.
Thread by Thread: Lessons from Migrating to Fabric
What does it take to roll out Microsoft Fabric in a real-life data team? In this session, we’ll walk through the journey of implementing Fabric at a mid-sized organization, from first pilot to full adoption. You’ll hear what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned along the way.
Thread by Thread: Lessons from Migrating to Fabric
What does it take to roll out Microsoft Fabric in a real-life data team? In this session, we’ll walk through the journey of implementing Fabric at a mid-sized organization, from first pilot to full adoption. You'll hear what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned along the way.
We’ll cover how we approached access control, workspace setup, setup of pipelines and notebooks, dbt, and monitoring, and where we had to get creative with workarounds. But we’ll also show how Fabric’s simplicity and rapid evolution made it a solid choice, even for teams without massive engineering resources. Whether you're considering Fabric or already using it, this talk will help you steer clear of common pitfalls and get the most out of what Fabric has to offer.
SQL Resurgence: Unleashing Data Potential with dbt
Join us on an exhilarating exploration of the data landscape as we delve into the phenomenon that is dbt. It has taken the world by storm and is now the most popular data transformation tool. Let’s dive into this new era and witness the renaissance of SQL at the core of data analytics, bringing it back to those who know the data best. During this talk we’ll get to experience the first steps into dbt and be ready for our first dbt project.
SQL Resurgence: Unleashing data potential with dbt
Join us on an exhilarating exploration of the data landscape as we delve into the phenomenon that is dbt. It has taken the world by storm and is now the most popular data transformation tool. Let’s dive into this new era and witness the renaissance of SQL at the core of data analytics, bringing it back to those who know the data best.
Medallion for Data Mesh: Exploring Workspace, Capacity, and Domain Design in Microsoft Fabric
Designing a medallion architecture is more than just setting up a few Lakehouses and Data Warehouses. In this session, data architects and engineers learn how to design a medallion architecture with Fabric Workspaces, Capacities, and Domains. We’ll cover the segregation of responsibilities, granular access control, and how to pick and choose the right Capacities for every workload. By the end of this talk, you’ll be ready to design a scalable and secure data platform with Microsoft Fabric.
Hardening Fabric Warehouse Security
Learn how to secure Fabric Data Warehouse from the ground up. This session covers end-to-end practices—from secure connectivity and authentication to auditing, monitoring, and governance—highlighting new features that strengthen compliance, visibility, and trust at scale.
From Lock-In to Openness: The Shift in Data Platforms
Take a look at the marketing of any modern data platform and you’ll notice a common theme — they all emphasize their openness. But what does that really mean? What happened to the good old days of vendor lock-in? And how “open” are these platforms, really?
In this talk, we’ll take a closer look at Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, dbt + Fivetran, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, AWS, and a few exotic birds like MotherDuck. We’ll explore how these platforms position themselves, what they truly have in common, and — most importantly — how this new era of openness benefits you as a data practitioner.
There’s never been a better time to work in data!
From Flat to Sparkling: Monitoring Data Quality with Soda in Microsoft Fabric
After loading all of your data into OneLake, you might be wondering how to ensure its quality. In this session, we’ll explore and demonstrate how Soda can help you monitor data quality with automated data testing and alerting, write and monitor data contracts, and browse data quality metrics in a user-friendly dashboard.
From Fabric to Fantastic: How dbt Makes Your Lakehouses and Warehouses Shine
Unlock the full potential of your Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse or Lakehouse. This session dives into dbt, a tool that streamlines SQL development within Fabric. Learn from the creator of dbt-fabric how dbt lowers the barrier of entry into the world of data analytics to everyone who ever wrote a line of SQL. dbt empowers data teams with functionalities like data documentation, automated testing, and data lineage for reliable and insightful analytics.
Fabric Fortresses: Setting Up Microsoft Fabric for Your Enterprise Needs
Join us to master Microsoft Fabric for enterprise-level challenges. Learn how to integrate private networking, manage the challenges of resilience and disaster recovery, ensure seamless access control and configure vigilant monitoring to safeguard your data architecture. We’ll use Workspace Identity, Private Endpoints, and go through all the different ways to provide or restrict access to your data. By the end of this talk, you’ll be ready to build a robust and secure data platform on Microsoft Fabric.
Fabric Fortresses: Setting Up Microsoft Fabric for Your Enterprise Needs
Join us to master Microsoft Fabric for enterprise-level challenges. Learn how to integrate private networking, manage resilience and disaster recovery, ensure seamless access control and configure vigilant monitoring to safeguard your data architecture. We’ll use Workspace Identity, Private Endpoints, and go through all the different ways to provide or restrict access to your data. By the end of this talk, you’ll be ready to build a robust and secure data platform on Microsoft Fabric.
dbt & Fabric: better together
dbt is the new data transformation tool taking the world by storm. It lowers the barrier of entry into the world of data analytics to everyone who ever wrote a line of SQL. Did you know it integrates quite well with Microsoft Fabric? Join this session to follow in the footsteps of thousands of analytics engineers and fall in love with dbt. We’ll use Fabric and VS Code to build our first Hello Fabric project.
Can you feel the breeze? Data-aware scheduling and more new features in Airflow
Remember when you last used Airflow? You might have been scratching your head a few times. Recently Airflow has picked up a steady pace of releases packed with lots of interesting new features. In this talk we'll go over them and see how they individually contribute to a new way to use Airflow.
- TaskFlow and recent improvements
- Dynamic Task Mapping
- Data-aware scheduling
- Deferrable operators
- Grid View & logging
- KubernetesPodOperator vs. KubernetesExecutor vs. KubernetesCeleryExecutor
- Official Helm chart
- Comparison with Prefect
Fabric Capacities: Divide and Conquer
A single Fabric Capacity is easy to set up. But what about the risk of a single user taking down your entire data estate with a poorly written query? In this session, we’ll explore how to split and configure Fabric Capacities for different workloads. Autoscaling, auto pause, bursting, smoothing, monitoring, and more, we’ll cover it all. By the end of this talk, you’re ready to build a scalable and robust design Fabric Workspace and Capacity design for the entire organization.
Building & deploying Azure self-service data platforms for healthcare
Using a combination of Azure managed services, a lot of Azure DevOps and Terraform, LynxCare can provide ready-to-go data platforms on Azure to its customers. We are able to onboard a new hospital and provide them access to their own isolated data platform in a matter of minutes, where they can perform data analysis on healthcare data in a standardized and privacy-preserving way.
In this talk we’ll demonstrate some of the building blocks of the platform, but more importantly how we build & deploy this reusable platform. We'll cover the benefits of using Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD pipelines for everything. We’ll focus on the infrastructure and setup, how it brings value to our customers, and peace of mind to our team. We will discuss next steps and lessons learned. Peace of mind for dev and infra team?
Behind the scenes: contributing to dbt-core and its adapters
In this talk, we will go through the inner workings of dbt. How does it do its magic? What better way to learn how dbt works than by contributing to it yourself? We'll dig deeper into how dbt is built and how you can take a look under hood yourself by making your first contributions.
Data Platform Next Step Sessionize Event Upcoming
Data Point Prague 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
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Data Science Leuven User group Sessionize Event
FABCON 2026 & SQLCON 2026 - SESSIONS Sessionize Event
Fabric February 2026 Sessionize Event
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dataMinds Connect 2025 Sessionize Event
SQLBits 2025 - General Sessions Sessionize Event
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Fabric February 2025 Sessionize Event
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Data Saturday & Fabric Friday Holland 2024 Sessionize Event
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Belgium dbt Meetup User group Sessionize Event
Data Platform Next Step 2023 Sessionize Event
AZUG - May Meetup 2022 Sessionize Event
Sam Debruyn
Microsoft Data Platform MVP, cloud & data platform architect
Heist-op-den-Berg, Belgium
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