I have been talking/thinking about SQLBits 2024 a lot since the event wrapped just over a month ago. Finally, I am getting around to writing about my experience as a first-time speaker, multi-time attendee, friend, mentee, colleague, and data professional at SQLBits this year. 

Highlights

• My first ever hat trick at any international conference — still cannot believe the first time I achieved this was at SQLBits
• This is my first time being a trainer at SQLBits — I know how much of a big deal training day is. The fact that we got selected for pre-con training made a lot of people jealous, mentors and colleagues alike  
• Mark Pryce-Maher’s Slide Karaoke performance — I know Benni De Jagere won and he is the rightful winner. However, Mark’s deliciously chaotic 5 minutes made me laugh so hard that it still puts a smile on my face when I think about it today.
• The party – SQLBits party has always been EPIC. This year, I had to insert some self-discipline, given we were presenting the first session the next morning, but I still had a great time. 
• My Microsoft colleagues – these are some phenomenal people: the CAT team, SQL gurus like Buck Woody, and my friends at UK Sub.  It was just pure joy to learn from, laugh with, catching up with this awesome group. 

Why SQLBits?

SQLBits has always been special to me. I have attended Bits for years. I still remember being a total fan girl when I saw Simon Whiteley and Patrick LeBlanc for the first time at SQLBits years ago. Every year I learn a lot, catch up with friends that I usually don’t have a chance to catch up with and meet a lot more people that run around in the same circle. 

These days, I don’t do pre-canned presentations at marketing events. Instead, I prioritize community conferences and present content that is tailored to that audience. What better community conference to present at than SQLBits? It is the biggest in Europe, it is run by an amazing group of volunteers and the themed event every year means a good time in addition to learning/networking/knowledge sharing. 

Day 1 Pre-con training

Day 1 was the toughest day out of all 5 days for me. Vuong Nguyen and I were training people for Advanced Data Engineering with Databricks. The original content from Databricks Academy was 12 hours. We tailored it to incorporate the newest Databricks features and to fit into the timeframe of the 1-day training. Still, it was a lot of content to go through, and I passed out at 8pm that evening. I had a super genius like Vuong to collaborate with. I honestly don’t know how Marco Russo does a whole day of training all by himself. Absolute legend. 

Day 2 Ask the expert session

I really loved the Ask the Expert session. As a solution architect, I work mainly with HCLS customers these days. As a data engineering, data quality, and Power BI SME, I get invited by my co-workers to talk to their customers about these topics specifically. It has been a long while since I talked to someone who is not in HCLS vertical about their problem statement, designing the architecture E2E on the fly, as well as going through their use cases and discussing how the latest features can help. It’s also particularly fun when you cannot foresee where the questions might come from. We discussed a range of topics going from data ingestion and data government all the way to Gen AI. 

Day 3 Slide Karaoke 

It’s safe to say Slide Karaoke was my favourite session. Simon Whitely did a great job putting together a collection of unpredictable slides. In addition, a room of a few hundred people singing happy birthday to him for his 40^th birthday was a special moment. It was a nice thank-you for everything he’s done for this community. Everyone did a great job given how difficult the task was. However, Benni De Jagere stood out. The amount of composure he possessed and the smoothness of the presentation ( when was designed to be disruptive) was simply impressive. Hats off to Benni. Well Done! Mark Pryce-Maher’s session stood out in a different way. Granted, he got a special slide deck (I might or might not have contributed to that), the technical challenges of presenting laptop also didn’t help,  but he designed the session to be chaotic even without these external factors. 

Day 4 General session on Databricks Assistant

I had the pleasure to present Databricks assistant with my most frequent collaborator Marius Panga on Day 4. Everything went really well apart from the fact that I said the word “copilot” about 6 times, and when I turned around, I saw Marius’ face turning green, realized the mistake I was making, made a joke and, corrected myself. 😀 In addition, we were way too brave to do a live demo at a conference of that many people sharing the wi-fi. Luckily the demo worked in the end, but next time we will definitely record the demo instead. 

Day 5 General session on Unity Catalog

We didn’t know how many people would come to the Unity Catalog session that me and Vuong were doing at 9am on Day 5. It was the morning after the party and everyone was having a great time at the party. In the end we had a full room and the session went smoothly, which was a definite relief.

Overall experience

Themed event

This year the theme was aviation. It was hilarious when we had to pause the training day for 30 seconds. and let a plane take off first. The noise the plane was making was so loud that nobody could hear us in the training room in ICC. 

Aviation also makes a great party outfit. While everyone else was a pilot or flight attendant, Mark Pryce-Maher was creative and came as the movie Up, which won him the best outfit award. 

Speaker experience

I have applied to speak at SQLBits before, this is the first year that I got accepted. It was some experience. My favourite part of the elusive speaker lounge, which took us a while to find. But industry legends like Marco Russo and Bob Ward were sitting next to me at the same table in the speaker lounge. I was too shy to introduce myself, but I definitely took a mental selfie at that moment.

Learning

It was honestly brilliant to learn from friends and gurus alike. While I do not work for Microsoft anymore, I am genuinely interested in the development that Microsoft has been driving for SQL and Fabric/Power BI alike. 

Catching up with friends

While there are some friends that I see at almost all conferences, there are some I only have the chance to catch up with once a year at SQLBits. It was fantastic catching up with Buck Woody and Markus Ehrenmueller-Jensen. I met Buck at SQLBits last year. For someone of his calibre, he is so nice and approachable. Everything he’ s taught me since we met has been instrumental in changing the way I approach my career and decision-making in general. Markus got me into public speaking in the first place. Without his generosity with his time and knowledge, I won’t be doing public speaking today, let alone speaking at SQLBits.

Networking

It is a huge community given how many people are attending SQLBits. It’s also a very small one. I see the same faces around every year. I want to thank SQLBits for giving me a platform to speak to the audience that I want to speak to, the type of audience I will typically not reach by speaking at Databricks events only.

Special thanks

First, I want to thank the organizers/volunteers of SQLBits, you did a splendid job and made a huge event very successful. I want to thank all the friends/mentors/ex-colleagues/partners whom I had a chance to catch up with. Thank you for reminiscing with me, laughing with me and making new memories with me. I want to thank Vuong and Marius for working with me on the training/presentations. I want to thank Simon Whiteley for inviting me to judge on Slide Karaoke. I want to thank everyone who taught me something at SQLBits 2024. Hopefully I will see you all at SQLBits 2025.