Microsoft Fabric on Sam Debruyn

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

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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. Soda is an open-source CLI tool where I recently contributed support for Microsoft Fabric. It’s available for Lakehouses and Data Warehouses and comes with an easy and git-controlled YAML syntax to monitor all aspects of data quality.

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

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Website | Schedule

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. It lowers the barrier of entry into the world of data analytics to everyone who ever wrote a line of SQL. Learn how dbt empowers data teams with functionalities like data documentation, automated testing, and data lineage for reliable and insightful analytics.

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

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meetup

Unlock the full potential of your Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse or Lakehouse. In this session, analytics engineers can learn from the top contributor to dbt-fabric what Microsoft Fabric is all about and how dbt is the perfect tool to build data transformations on Microsoft Fabric. We’ll cover the basics of Microsoft Fabric, how to connect dbt Cloud with Microsoft Fabric, and how to build our first Hello Fabric project.

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

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

Website | Tickets | Agenda

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?

dbt fundamentals: an introduction to dbt in 2026 (workshop)

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Website | Tickets | Agenda

New to dbt? This hands-on tutorial is your launchpad. Starting from scratch, you’ll set up your first dbt project in dbt Platform’s Studio IDE against Microsoft Fabric, with no local 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 tutorial gives you the foundation to hit the ground running on your first real dbt project.

Fabric Capacities: The Administrator's Guide

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Details & registration

Fabric Capacities are deceptively simple to provision — but one runaway query can throttle your entire organization. This session is the administrator’s deep dive into bursting, smoothing, overage debt, throttling, and the governance levers that keep workloads in check. We cover monitoring with the Capacity Metrics App and Real-Time Hub, cost optimization with reservations and autoscale billing, Spark and SQL Database governance, and practical sizing workflows to go from proof of concept to scaled adoption.

Hardening Fabric Warehouse Security

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tickets | Session

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.

Thread by Thread: Lessons from Migrating to Fabric

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

Tickets | Schedule

Guest on Bright Signal podcast: Should Startups Bet on Microsoft Fabric? - Fabric Data Days Edition

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This podcast was formerly known as the Monkey Patching podcast, but it has been rebranded as the Bright Signal podcast.

Episode page

In this episode, I discuss Microsoft Fabric with the hosts of the Bright Signal podcast. We cover a range of topics, including the features and capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, its suitability for startups, integration with other tools, getting started with the platform, AI capabilities, challenges and limitations, cost and pricing structure, data storage and management, machine learning and AI integration, best practices for data transformation, the future of data engineering skills, and community resources for Microsoft Fabric.

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

Fabric Capacities: Divide and Conquer

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

More information | Session details | Tickets

SQL Resurgence: Unleashing data potential with dbt

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

Tickets & registration | Schedule

Guest on DataTopics podcast: SQLBits Unfiltered - dbt in Fabric, MLOps in Action & Copilot in Question

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Listen here

I was a guest on the DataTopics podcast, where we discussed all the news from SQLBits .

We discussed the current state of Microsoft Fabric, dbt, MLOps, and Copilot.

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 Capacities: Divide and Conquer

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Details

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.

Fabric Capacities: Divide and Conquer

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

More information | Session details | Tickets

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.

Quick Tip: Fabric Runtime preinstalled packages

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:40:34 +0200

Today I have a quick tip for you. I thought that I could find the list of preinstalled Python packages somewhere on Microsoft Learn , but either Microsoft stopped publishing this, or I couldn’t find it. So with this tip, you can easily find the list of preinstalled packages in your Fabric Runtime environment.

All the different ways to authenticate to Azure SQL, Synapse, and Fabric

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 19:04:37 +0200

In this post I’ll go over all the details on acquiring access tokens to authenticate to any Microsoft SQL engine, including Azure SQL, Azure Synapse and Microsoft Fabric. We’ll explore users, service principals, managed identities, and Fabric Workspace Identity.

Why would you want to do this? Well, if you’re looking to get programmatic access to your database / data warehouse, you’ll need to authenticate. In 2025, more often than not, you’ll be using Microsoft Entra ID to do so and this is where the fun begins.

Fabric Capacities: Divide and Conquer

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

More information | Tickets | Agenda

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.

All Microsoft Fabric icons for diagramming

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 13:26:42 +0200

Do you often have to draw up diagrams of data flows or data architectures and would you like to use Microsoft Fabric icons in your diagrams? Then this post is for you! I always found it hard to find the right icons I needed, so I’ve put them all on this single page for easy access, both as PNG and SVG.

I just took the new Fabric DP-700 Data Engineering Exam: here's what you should know

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 23:45:03 +0200

I took the new DP-700 exam, released just hours ago in beta, and I’m here to share my experience along with some tips to help you prepare.

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.

Fabric Capacities: Divide and Conquer

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More information | Tickets

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.

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.

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

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Registration

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.

SQL Resurgence: Unleashing Data Potential with dbt - workshop

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Information | Tickets

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 .

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

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I gave a session on dbt at the Microsoft Fabric Global Online Conference. If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, get your ticket for this free online event: https://microsoftfabric.global/

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

Guest on DataTopics Unplugged podcast: Unraveling the Fabric of Data: Microsoft's Ecosystem and Beyond

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was a guest on the DataTopics Unplugged podcast, where we discussed several data-related topics.

Show notes and download/listen links

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 2 - Reports

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 20:59:15 +0200

Welcome to the fifth 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: 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.

Fabric end-to-end use case: Data Engineering part 2 - Pipelines

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 09:59:04 +0200

Welcome to the third 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: 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!

How to use service principal authentication to access Microsoft Fabric's OneLake

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 10:28:11 +0200

Microsoft recently added support to authenticate to OneLake using service principals and managed identities. This allows users to access OneLake from applications without having to use a user account. Let’s see how this works.

A closer look at Microsoft Fabric pricing, billing, and autoscaling

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:17:06 +0200

If you’re considering using Microsoft Fabric, you’re probably thinking “How much is this going to cost me?” Continue reading to learn how Microsoft might have just created the most compelling data platform offering available today.

Migrating Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL to Microsoft Fabric

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 23:04:37 +0200

If all those posts about Microsoft Fabric have made you excited, 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 steps to migrate to Microsoft Fabric. Today: starting from Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools.

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.

dbt & Fabric: better together

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I gave a talk at the Data Platform Next Step conference in Billund, Denmark. The conference was the first conference with sessions about Microsoft Fabric right after the launch of the public preview at Microsoft Build .

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 all Microsoft SQL products and even with Fabric? Join this session to follow in the footsteps of thousands of analytics engineers and fall in love with dbt. Learn more about how dbt works with Fabric and Azure SQL from the maintainer of the official dbt adapter! We’ll use Fabric and VS Code to build our first Hello Fabric project.

Fabric training programs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Microsoft Fabric since early 2023 and have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award specifically for Fabric. I have a deep understanding of the platform and its capabilities, and I’m excited to share my knowledge with you. I’ve worked out several training programs that can help you and your team get started with Fabric, or to deepen your knowledge of the platform.