Attending SQLDay 2024 in Wrocław, Poland

Here’s a short post about a conference I’m attending right now.

SQLDay is one of the biggest events in Europe dedicated to the Microsoft data platform, including databases, Big Data and Business Intelligence solutions, and advanced data analytics. The conference is organized by the Data Community Poland association.
Sessions from previous years are available on their YouTube channel.

I have the chance to attend the event and learn new things about the Microsoft data ecosystem.
Located in Wrocław, Poland, we’re lucky enough to have great weather and a great view between each session.

I won’t go into the technical details of the sessions I attended, but just share a few things.

Chriss Web’s keynote session was both interesting and fun, including a comparison between Microsofts Fabric components and the Happy Meal 🙂 Great session and speaker !

The first conference session I attended was hosted by Rudi Bruchez, the organizer of the DataFrogs online conference I’ve presented at in the past. The next DataFrogs is scheduled in June, so don’t miss it if you understand French.

This sessions openned my eyes on capabilities of LLMs I was not aware of. I’ll sure look deeper into it.
Giving GPT 4 a screenshot of the SSMS database properties window and receiving in return the indication of options that don’t respect best practices is really cool!

Ola Hallengren did a session about SQL Server 2022 performance features.
I was already familiar with most of the material presented as I’ve done presentations on the subject myself, but I did notice a few things I missed, concerning Stack dumps for example. I’ll take a look at this later.

I also attended a session entitled “Deneb and Vega-Lite: The Secret Weapon for Custom Power BI Visuals” by Krystsina Kremianeuskaya. I’m not someone who frequently produces Power BI reports, so I’m not the target audience for this session, but I did realized how complex the subject can be, and that we really need experts in this field.

So far, I’ve been amazed by the scale and quality of the event, and I love learning from the experts.
Great sessions!
A party is planned throughout the evening, and will probably be the highlight of the conference.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference tomorrow and I will for sure try to come back next year.