Exploring the Future of Data at SQLBits 2025 in London

I’m looking back on three amazing days of interesting technical insights from the SQLBits event 2025 in London. It’s actually my first time having the pleasure of attending one of Europe’s biggest data platform events and I can sincerely say, that I enjoyed every minute of interesting workshops and sessions all around Data management, Data engineering and analytics with the latest technologies from Microsoft.

The sessions and workshops on the event mainly focused on the evolution of AI and a lot about Business Intelligence and Data Engineering with a big focus on Microsoft Fabric the unifying data platform from Microsoft. The choice of topics reflects the direction in which I believe the industry is heading, and I took the opportunity to gain valuable insights from renowned experts.

On the first day, I attended a one-day workshop on the latest AI functionalities in SQL Server and Azure SQL, focusing on how these features support the integration of external AI models with your data, enabling the development of context- and data-aware AI assistants for your application’s users based on the RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pattern. It was very interesting, the workshop was delivered in a high quality and it was even my personal highlight of the event.

On the second day I joined again a one-day workshop about Microsoft Fabric. I was very curious about Microsoft Fabric because I heard a lot of advantages about this end to end SaaS Data Platform and I was happy to learn more about it. The workshop covered a lot of topics regarding Microsoft Fabric and at the end of the day I had a good feeling of understanding the concept and the core elements about Microsoft Fabric.

During the break I enjoyed a fancy coffee served at the Microsoft booth 🙂

On the last day I attended again a one-day workshop about Microsoft Fabric but with more focus on the administration of a Fabric Tenant including workspace management, security, Git Integration etc. The workshop was again delivered in a good quality and I really enjoyed to attend. The Kahoot Quiz at the end of the workshop confirmed my Impression that I’m on track of understanding this platform quite well.

The event was awesome, I learned a lot about the latest technologies and I hope that I will be able to apply the gained knowledge in upcoming projects. I can highly recommend this event to every data professional working with Microsoft technologies!