Power BI Architecture Choices for Azure Databricks (w/ Liping Huang)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

October 16th 2026 - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

Power BI gives you four main ways to report on data that lives in Azure Databricks: Direct Lake on OneLake, Direct Lake over mirrored Unity Catalog tables, DirectQuery against a Databricks SQL warehouse, and a composite model with import aggregations. Liping Huang wrote Microsoft's new white paper benchmarking all four side by side, and joins me to walk through the results.

The test runs the same TPC-DS data at roughly 26 million, 260 million and 2.6 billion rows, across cold, warm and hot cache, three filter scenarios and a 20-user load test. No pattern wins everywhere. Direct Lake holds up best for the warm and hot cache reports people open every day, queries that hit an aggregation table stay under 100ms at every volume, DirectQuery catches up (and sometimes wins) at 2.6 billion rows on an X-Large warehouse, and mirrored Unity Catalog tables slow down badly as the data grows.

GUEST BIO (NAME HERE) 👤

Liping Huang is the CEO of Data Leaps and a Data & AI Architect, blogger, YouTuber, keynote speaker and user group organizer (ex-Microsoft, ex-Databricks). Liping works with Tabular Editor as Field CTO for APAC and is passionate about helping Power BI users build better semantic models faster, creating content about Tabular Editor, Power BI, Fabric and Databricks on the Data Leaps YouTube channel and at dataleaps.co.uk.

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Demystifying Databricks AI Coworker (w/ Youssef Mrini)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

September 11th - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

As enterprise AI transitions from basic conversational interfaces to context-aware execution, AI coworkers are redefining how organizations interact with their data ecosystem.

In this session, we demystify the paradigm of Databricks AI Coworker and examine how agentic workflows adapt to diverse operational needs, from plain-language business automation and decision support to code-first data engineering and developer pipelines.

GUEST BIO (Youssef Mrini) 👤

Youssef Mrini is a Developer Advocate at Databricks focused on empowering teams to build on the Databricks Data+AI Platform. His work centers on the Databricks Ecosystem such as AI/BI, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and native agentic workflows like Genie. Youssef produces deep-dive technical tutorials, and production-ready guidance dedicated entirely to maximizing value on Databricks.

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Building Operational Systems on Databricks (with Andre Landgraf)Building Operational Systems on Databricks - with Andre Landgraf

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

June 26th: 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

There are two broad categories of systems: analytical systems and operational systems. Databricks is primarily known for the former. It’s an OLAP platform where organizations ingest, manage, analyze, and derive value from their data. This includes everything from business intelligence and analytics to machine learning models, AI workloads, and data pipelines.

The resulting insights, predictions, and AI-generated outputs need to flow back into operational systems that can act on them, whether that's powering an internal tool or personalizing a customer experience. This is even more true in the age of AI, where this data becomes context for agents. To make that possible, we need ways to channel analytical data back into operational systems (data apps, AI agents, and more).

In this session, I’ll give an overview of the Databricks capabilities that help operationalize analytical data. We’ll look at services such as Databricks Apps, Lakebase, and other platform components that enable you to build operational and agentic applications directly within your Databricks workspace. Let's vibe code an app from scratch and cover practical vibe coding best practices while integrating data from your lakehouse.

GUEST BIO (Andre Landgraf) 👤

Andre is a passionate developer from Germany who loves building for the web. Based in the Bay Area, he is a Staff Developer Advocate at Databricks. He was previously a Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn and holds master’s degrees in Information Systems and Computer Science. In his free time, he brings the community together through All Things Web events in San Francisco.

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