Microsoft Fabric Dublin

Important Details
This event will be ONLINE using Teams. not in person!

Topic Summary
SQL Server 2025 introduces native vector support, enabling AI-powered semantic search directly inside the database engine. But what does that mean for data professionals, how does it actually work, and why should you care?

In this session, we’ll break down the fundamentals of vector search and show exactly how SQL Server stores, indexes, and queries embeddings to deliver semantic search capabilities.

We’ll cover:

What embeddings are and how the vector data type works in SQL Server
How to generate and store embeddings using an external LLM
Performing searches using vector_search() and vector_distance()
How vector indexes (aka the DiskANN algorithm) work under the hood

We'll then bring it all together to build an intelligent, AI-driven application to...provide burrito restaurant recommendations in Ireland.

This session is ideal for data professionals and developers who want a practical understanding of SQL Server’s vector capabilities, with real demos and a real use case.

Important Details
This event will be ONLINE using Teams. not in person!

Topic Summary
A software-as-a-service offering such as Microsoft Fabric offers a fixed cost per month, making budgeting much easier. That should be the end of the conversation, but it's actually only the beginning - how do you make the most of the capacity units you get with the fixed price? How can you ensure that you are getting the most out of your monthly investment? The different Fabric workloads all have different ways of using capacity units - some are cost CUs per minute of runtime, some cost per query, some are straight forward to calculate, some are not.

Take dataflows gen 2 an an example - it used to be the most expensive way by far of doing data integration compared to pipelines or copy jobs, but what does "expensive" mean in the grand scheme of things? Depending on your organization's previous experience and skill level, dataflows might instead end up being the cheapest option!
There is much more to optimizing the bang for your buck with Fabric than only looking at the relative costs of capacity units, as it is easy to get lost in the technology instead of looking at the big picture.

This session will look at capacity units as a concept, compare how the different workloads drive capacity unit usage, explore ways to optimize workload usage to decrease compute costs, and discuss other factors that impact the overall cost conversation around Fabric.

Data is powerful, but on its own it rarely inspires action. In this session, we’ll take a real dataset of baby names from the U.S. Census Bureau and turn it into a story that grabs attention. You’ll learn how to find the most interesting insights, visualize them in ways that make sense, and weave them into a narrative that resonates with any audience. Whether your story feels like a history, a tragedy, or a thriller, you’ll leave knowing how to make your data speak in a way that people remember.

Important Details
This event will be ONLINE using Teams. not in person!

Lightning Talks!!!
We have several speakers, both first timers and experiences joining to deliver 10-15 minute sessions on various topics around Power BI and Fabric.

Help!!
Would you like to speak? We are looking for speakers who are trying this for the firs time. You will be supported through the journey and given advice on making it easy. Please reach out to Ben or Bob if you'd like to try it.

*** There are speaker prizes on offer ***

Afterwards
We will enjoy an end-of-year social at the Brewdog pub nearby to look back at the successful year we've had.