DFW Power BI and Fabric User Group

Transition from Data Analyst to Data Engineer: Upgrading Skills from DataFlows Gen2 to Notebooks

This session shows an analyst how to use notebooks to perform the same actions as Dataflow Gen2. Looking at 4 areas: source, transformation, cleansing, and destination, examples include append/merge query to dataframe joins, text replace functionality, split and concatenate columns, as well as pivot/unpivot, data type changes, and removing duplicates. We will finish off with engine optimizations.

Speaker
Thomas LeBlanc, MVP

Thomas LeBlanc is a Microsoft Fabric and Business Intelligence architect, SQL Server expert, trainer and author. He has been building performant data warehouse solutions and visualizations for the past 20 years and has certifications in Power BI, Fabric, Dimensional Modeling and Data Vault 2.0. He graduated from LSU in Quantitative Business Analysis with a concentration in Management Information Systems. Microsoft awarded him Data Platform MVP in 2017 and has been renewed every year since. For the past 25 years, he has focused on data warehouse solutions(on-premises and Azure) using Microsoft tools like Integration Services(SSIS), Analysis Services(SSAS), Power BI(on-premises and cloud), Synapse, Microsoft Fabric and Azure Data Factory. He recently published the second edition of Power BI Performance Best Practices.

Being involved in the data community since 2012, he helps the Baton Rouge User Groups with meetings every month and hosting a SQLSaturday every year. He has spoken at conferences like PASS Summit, SQLSaturday, Live360, VSLive, Dynamics Community Summit NA and Power Platform events.