When we got back from FABCON // SQLCON Atlanta 2026, one thing was made immediately clear: the market is not short on interest. But it is short on certainty. This year’s combined event brought Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft SQL audiences together under one roof, with...
A data model diagram is easy to dismiss until a project gets too large, a source system changes or the one person who “understands how it all fits together” goes on vacation. That is the real problem that visual modeling solves. Modern data teams have more code, more...
If you are creating a data warehouse after a failed BI or analytics initiative, the instinct is often to assume the strategy itself was wrong. Usually, it was not. Most failed data warehouse projects do not collapse because the business case was weak. They fail...
Cloud migration projects fail when teams treat them like data center relocations. The schema you optimized for SQL Server won't perform the same way in Snowflake's columnar architecture. Batch ETL windows that made sense on dedicated hardware waste money during...
Key takeaways: SQL Server warehouses aren't legacy; they're production environments that need faster build processes Manual builds scale poorly: 200 tables can equal 400+ SSIS packages, inconsistent SCD logic across developers Metadata-driven automation can cut...
Key Takeaways Architecture decisions in week one can determine costs for years. Wrong pattern = 6-12 months of rework. Star schemas work for most reporting workloads. Data Vault is for when you need full audit trails or volatile sources. Three-tier separation isolates...
TL;DR Data Vault on Snowflake works well for: Integrating 20+ data sources with frequent schema changes Meeting strict compliance requirements with complete audit trails Supporting multiple teams developing data pipelines in parallel Building enterprise systems that...
TL;DR: Legacy data platforms weren't built for real-time analytics, AI workloads, or today's data volumes. This three-phase framework covers cloud migration, architecture selection (warehouse, lakehouse, or hybrid), and pipeline automation. The goal: replace brittle,...
Migrating on-premises SQL Server to Azure shifts infrastructure management to the cloud while maintaining control over data workloads. Organizations move to Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or in some instances on-prem SQL Server on Azure run on virtual...