Data Lakehouse on Sam Debruyn

From Lock-In to Openness: The Shift in Data Platforms

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Thread by Thread: Lessons from Migrating to Fabric

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tickets | Schedule

SQL Resurgence: Unleashing data potential with dbt

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The largest Microsoft Fabric community event in Belgium

Thread by Thread: Lessons from Migrating to Fabric

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The largest Microsoft Fabric community event in Belgium

Agenda | Tickets

SQL Resurgence: Unleashing data potential with dbt

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Tickets & registration | Schedule

From Fabric to Fantastic: How dbt Makes Your Lakehouses and Warehouses Shine

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

More information | Session details | Tickets | Agenda

Fabric Fortresses: Setting Up Microsoft Fabric for Your Enterprise Needs

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

More information | Session details | Tickets

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.

From Flat to Sparkling: Monitoring Data Quality with Soda in Microsoft Fabric

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Free registration | Agenda

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.

Fabric Fortresses: Setting Up Microsoft Fabric for Your Enterprise Needs

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

More information, schedule, and tickets

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.

From Flat to Sparkling: Monitoring Data Quality with Soda in Microsoft Fabric

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Tickets

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.

Medallion for Data Mesh: Exploring Workspace, Capacity, and Domain Design in Microsoft Fabric

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More information

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.

Medallion for Data Mesh: Exploring Workspace, Capacity, and Domain Design in Microsoft Fabric

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Tickets & registration | Schedule

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.

Medallion for Data Mesh: Exploring Workspace, Capacity, and Domain Design in Microsoft Fabric [EXTENDED TALK / DEEP-DIVE]

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More information | Tickets

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.

NL dbt meetup: From Fabric to Fantastic: How dbt Makes Your Lakehouses and Warehouses Shine

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On the 20th of September, I spoke at the NL dbt meetup .

Medallion for Data Mesh: Exploring Workspace, Capacity, and Domain Design in Microsoft Fabric

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On June 20th I spoke at the Fabric Brussels meetup.

Event details

SQL Resurgence - Unleashing Data Potential with dbt on Databricks

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Event details

I spoke at the Databricks meetup on how you can use dbt with SQL on Databricks to unleash the full potential of your data. The event was held at Cegeka in Antwerp, Belgium.

Speakers:

Sam Debruyn (tech lead data & cloud @ dataroots)
Fabrice Deseyn (data architect & team lead @ Cegeka)

Fabric: Lakehouse or Data Warehouse?

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 10:24:43 +0200

There are 2 kinds of companies currently active in the Microsoft data space: those who are migrating to Microsoft Fabric, and those who will soon be planning their migration to Microsoft Fabric. 😅 One question that often comes back is

Should I focus on the Lakehouse or the Data Warehouse?

Let’s answer that in this post. I can already tell you this: you’re asking the wrong question 😉

Data Agility Unleashed: A Deep Dive into Microsoft Fabric's Features (dataroots Fabric Event)

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was invited to speak at the dataroots Microsoft Fabric Event in Leuven, Belgium. The event was held at De Hoorn, an old brewery in the city center.

Speakers:

Sam Debruyn (tech lead data & cloud @ dataroots)
Jonas Tundo (CEO @ dataroots)
Priya Sathy (Partner Director of Products @ Microsoft)

Pictures:

Is Microsoft Fabric just a rebranding?

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 10:53:24 +0200

It’s a question I see popping up every now and then. Is Microsoft Fabric just a rebranding of existing Azure services like Synapse, Data Factory, Event Hub, Stream Analytics, etc.? Is it something more? Or is it something entirely new?

I hate clickbait titles as much as you do. So, before we dive in, let me answer the question right away. No, Fabric is not just a rebranding. I would not even describe Fabric as an evolution (as Microsoft often does), but rather as a revolution! Now, let’s find out why.

My take-aways from Big Data London: Delta Lake & the open lakehouses

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 10:20:35 +0100

Last week I attended Big Data London. Both days were filled with interesting sessions, mostly focussing on one of the vendors also exhibiting at the conference. There are 2 things I am taking away from this conference: Delta Lake has won the data format wars, and your next data platform is either Snowflake, either an open Lakehouse.

Fabric end-to-end use case: Analytics Engineering part 1 - dbt with the Lakehouse

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 09:59:11 +0200

Welcome to the fourth part of a 5-part series on an end-to-end use case for Microsoft Fabric. This post will focus on the analytics engineering part of the use case.

In this series, we will explore how to use Microsoft Fabric to ingest, transform, and analyze data using a real-world use case. The series focuses on data engineering and analytics engineering. We will be using OneLake, Notebooks, Lakehouse, SQL Endpoints, Data Pipelines, dbt, and Power BI.

Fabric end-to-end use case: Data Engineering part 1 - Spark and Pandas in Notebooks

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 08:58:56 +0200

Welcome to the second part of a 5-part series on an end-to-end use case for Microsoft Fabric. This post will focus on the data engineering part of the use case.

Fabric end-to-end use case: overview & architecture

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 09:59:15 +0200

Welcome to the first part of a 5-part series on an end-to-end use case for Microsoft Fabric. This post will focus on the architecture overview of the use case.

Let Fabric teach you how to code with Data Wrangler

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:22:38 +0200

I’m going to be honest with you. I’m bad at writing Pandas data transformation code. Throughout the years I mostly focussed on the Spark APIs in Scala and PySpark, SQL, dbt, and some others, but I find the Pandas APIs usually just confusing and hard to read. I don’t like the black box magic and lock-in of low-code solutions either. Did you know that Microsoft Fabric has the perfect middle ground for this? It’s called Data Wrangler. Let’s dive in!

Connect to Fabric Lakehouses & Warehouses from Python code

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:14:24 +0200

In this post, I will show you how to connect to your Microsoft Fabric Lakehouses and Warehouses from Python.

Preparing a migration to Microsoft Fabric: from Azure Synapse Serverless SQL

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 11:16:45 +0200

If all those posts about Microsoft Fabric have made you curious, you might want to consider it as your next data platform. Since it is very new, not all features are available yet and most are still in preview. You could already adopt it, but if you want to deploy this to a production scenario, you’ll want to wait a bit longer. In the meantime, you can already start preparing for the migration. Let’s dive into the paths to migrate to Microsoft Fabric. Today: starting from Synapse Serverless SQL Pools.

Microsoft Fabric's Auto Discovery: a closer look

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0200

In previous posts , I dug deeper into Microsoft Fabric’s SQL-based features and we even explored OneLake using Azure Storage Explorer . In this post, I’ll take a closer look at Fabric’s auto-discovery feature using Shortcuts. Auto-discovery, what’s that?

Fabric’s Lakehouses can automatically discover all the datasets already present in your data lake and expose these as tables in Lakehouses (and Warehouses).

Cool, right? At the time of writing, there is a single condition: the tables must be stored in the Delta Lake format. Let’s take a closer look.

Exploring OneLake with Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 09:30:57 +0200

Recap: OneLake & Delta Lake

One of the coolest things about Microsoft Fabric is that it nicely decouples storage and compute and it is very transparent about the storage: everything ends up in the OneLake. This is a huge advantage over other data platforms since you don’t have to worry about moving data around, it is always available, wherever you need it.

Welcome to the 3rd generation: SQL in Microsoft Fabric

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 20:15:11 +0200

While typing this blog post, I’m flying back from the Data Platform Next Step conference where I gave a talk about using dbt with Microsoft Fabric . DP Next Step was the first conference focussed on Microsoft data services right after the announcement of Microsoft Fabric so a lot of speakers were Microsoft employees and most of the talks had some Fabric content.

Fabric Fabric Fabric, what is it all about? In this post I’ll go deeper into what it is, why you should care and focus specifically on the SQL aspect of Fabric.