Data Saturday Dallas 2024 was held on September 7, 2024, at the Microsoft office in Irving, Texas.
On Friday, I broke my tradition of working from the hotel and invested in myself by purchasing a pre-con session. Chuy Varela, a member of my Power BI study group (SML), encouraged me to sign up, and I am thankful I did. In the morning, I was dropped off at Whole Foods next to the Microsoft office for coffee.
I attended the pre-con session Harnessing the POWER of Microsoft Fabric by Adam Saxton and Patrick LeBlanc.
I learned and laughed a lot. One of the two big takeaways is copying your power query code to Dataflows Gen 2 and seeing if the query folding breaks. I can’t wait until Power BI Desktop gets the new Power Query user experience. Another valuable takeaway was using the Value.NativeQuery() function when using a custom query to enable query folding. I am also excited about Microsoft Fabric’s value – it offers so much. The Fabric Capacity Metric App will be beneficial in monitoring your Fabric capacity.
I know a theme is developing with my talk about the speaker dinner (hopefully, it is not like Fight Club and can be talked about). There is always great food, but the people make it worthwhile. Sometimes, there are people we haven’t seen in a year. Some are people we just saw at the last conference. Sitting where we did at dinner this time, we met new people we hope to see again soon.
We opted for Starbucks for Saturday since most of the local coffee shops did not open till later (Sunday, I ended up getting coffee from Black Rock Coffee Bar – a place we originally tried in Denver)
On Saturday, the kickoff was creative and played on the theme that we were at camp data.
I delivered my session Power up your Fabric Development with DAX Studio and Tabular Editor (GitHub slides), incorporating the changes I made since the last time I delivered it in Columbus.
The Path to Success with Power BI: Best Practices with Adam Saxton and Patrick LeBlanc reinforced the importance of following best practices, especially if you want your projects to scale. There were real-world examples of how not following the best practices would have cost more money or made performance unacceptable.
GitHub+MS Learn+Your Career by Mark Ghanayem was a unique session because we heard a lot about blogging but not much about contributing to Microsoft Documentation. Contributing to Microsoft Documentation is a chance to contribute to the community and has the side benefit of others noticing your contribution.
Monitoring Fabric Data Warehouse by Kal Yella built on what I learned in the pre-con about using the Fabric Capacity Metric app to monitor capacity. This session focused on the Data Warehouse and had more specific details.
After the conference, some people went to Kart racing. But for some, this was a long drive in addition to the journey back home. I would have done well at the Kart racing since I am skilled at throwing banana peels and turtle shells at the other drivers (there is a possibility I do not know what real Kart racing is like). We met at a local restaurant for appetizers and had an opportunity to talk. Some are friends we have met through conferences, and some I hadn’t met in person but only knew virtually.
On our way to dinner later that night, we passed a business named Must Love Fabric. I wish I had gone back and taken a picture.
We took a guided tour of the Dallas Stadium for our Sunday Fun Day. Even if you are not a football fan, it is a fantastic feat of engineering. Our tour guide, Wayne, was hilarious. We got to go to the player and cheerleader locker rooms and right up to the field. We couldn’t take the field because they were preparing for a soccer game and had natural grass on it.
Next year, we would like to visit The Star in Frisco and see the training field and all the complex offers. One place we discovered in Baton Rouge was a drink place specializing in iced tea called HTeaO. We found one near the stadium, and we both drank iced tea. We drove by the Texas School Book Depository on the way to lunch but did not stop. Since we were in Texas, we decided to eat where all the locals eat, In-n-Out. We are supposed to eat at Whataburger while in Texas, but we already have them in Tennessee. Dallas was a great conference, and I am glad I attended the pre-conference session. I hope we make it back next year.
The DAX Shepherd 
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