Reid Havens

LLMs are changing how BI developers work, and most teams are barely scratching the surface. This session goes beyond asking Copilot to write a measure. We'll look at how tools like Claude Code and the Power BI MCP server can be used to author DAX, document models, refactor naming conventions,...

Power BI reports are well known and widely used, but sometimes you need more control over layout and interactivity than a standard report page allows. Web based reporting using D3.js or Vega is a mature solution in this area that even predates Power BI, but has been too complex for most teas, requiring specialized skills and resources. However, agents make this faster, easier, and more cost effective. This means that you can build custom, bespoke dashboards with powerful visualizations catered to your specific business needs. This session walks through how to build custom web-based dashboards in Microsoft Fabric using coding agents and established libraries. We'll connect to semantic models, query the data, and render it in fully custom HTML interfaces that sit on top of the same trusted models your organization already maintains. You'll see what becomes possible when you're not boxed in by standard visual constraints, formatting limits, or canvas dimensions. In this session, we'll - Explain what a web-based dashboard is and how it compares to a report from an SSBI tool. - Explain how to create one with a coding agent, and how it works. - Discuss the benefits and advantages as well as any drawbacks and risks for those thinking to use this approach. - Provide you general tips for using AI and agents to build visualizations and dashboards. By the end you'll have a clear picture of when reaching for code and agents makes sense, and what the actual implementation path looks like if you decide to try it. Familiarity with frontend concepts, coding agents like Claude Code, and visualization in Fabric will help you get the most out of this session.

This session explains enhanced refresh techniques in Power BI, extending with end-to-end enterprise grade metadata driven pipelines in Fabric. It is suitable for aspiring data analysts and Power BI engineers looking to improve their ability to design scalable, flexible, and maintainable data solutions. First, we will cover enhanced refreshes and partitions in Power BI. This is needed for incremental or custom refresh patterns. Next we will deconstruct the refresh process, learning how to measure and optimise it. After this, we will learn how to build a metadata-driven framework using Fabric. This uses an external data source, such as a SQL table or a JSON file to dynamically control the pipeline behaviour, rather than hardcoding those details. This is key for enterprise solutions as it reduces duplication, improves scalability, and simplifies maintenance. We will then use this pipeline to send requests to refresh tables incrementally or full loads. We can also send custom requests to refresh only specific tables end-to-end, including source loads, transformations, and loading to the Power BI semantic model. Audience: • BI/SQL Professionals looking to broaden their knowledge of data engineering. • Data Analysts seeking to deepen their understanding of data architecture. • Power BI Engineers aiming to master scalable data pipeline architectures. Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with Power BI, Fabric, Pipelines, and fundamental data engineering principles. Knowledge of Python or SQL is helpful but not mandatory. All topics will be explained clearly and advanced knowledge of any tool is not needed.

Power BI Desktop shines with the right tooling. This workshop dives into external tools, governance services, modern modeling features, and scalable self-service patterns so you can build reliable, high-quality semantic models end to end.

In this rapid-fire lightning talk, you’ll learn about often invisible but important Power BI settings that quietly wreck performance, inflate models, and scramble results. With quick demos and instant fixes, you’ll walk away knowing exactly what to check so your reports stop fighting you.

Learn how to design and maintain a clean, scalable Power BI semantic model that supports growth and self-service. We’ll cover what belongs in the core model vs. the report layer, how to extend safely with composite models, when to use UDFs vs. calculation groups, and how tools like Tabular...

Solid data architecture is key for a scalable and maintainable pipeline, but can be difficult to implement.This session is for those familiar with Power BI or new data engineers, providing a step-by-step guide to Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers.Users will gain an overview of Medallion Architecture, Warehouses and Lakehouses, Delta and Parquet, GIT integration, monitoring, and compare available...

In this presentation, we will explore how to create effective shared semantic models in Power BI and how to manage them in the Power BI Service. Shared semantic models can help reduce the cost and complexity of fragmented data, also known as data silos, within an organization.

Transform your data solutions with a streamlined Medallion Architecture using Microsoft Fabric. This session is tailored for professionals familiar with Power BI and basic dataflows, providing a step-by-step guide to implementing Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers for a scalable and maintainable pipeline.

Power BI is a great sandbox environment for report design. However, knowing how to leverage visuals and features in a way that adds additional value can be challenging.

Transform your data solutions with a streamlined Medallion Architecture using Microsoft Fabric. This session is tailored for professionals familiar with Power BI and basic dataflows, providing a step-by-step guide to implementing Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers for a scalable and maintainable...

Transform your data solutions with a streamlined Medallion Architecture using Microsoft Fabric. This session is tailored for professionals familiar with Power BI and basic dataflows, providing a step-by-step guide to implementing Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers for a scalable and maintainable...

Fragmented data adds unnecessary cost and complexity within an organization! Within the Power BI platform these are called (data silos), where the ecosystem has nearly as many unique datasets as they do reports. This puts a burden on the developers to maintain these datasets, and the servers when the datasets refresh. It can even cause discrepancies in the logic between datasets resulting in different numbers! Thankfully this can be solved by leveraging the shared datasets feature in Power BI. In this session you will learn: how to properly configure a dataset for enhanced user experiences, enabling row level security (RLS) on a dataset to protect sensitive data, publish a dataset for optimal sharing and distribution, promote or certify a dataset for increased exposure, and view usage metrics to determine where the dataset is being used, and by whom.

There are two cornerstones to building optimized and low maintenance queries in Power BI. The first is making sure queries have been designed to refresh at optimal speeds.

As a Power BI Developer, many of us have had to take ownership of a report that we didn't author, often with little to no documentation! This session will provide a best practices toolset to help audit, repair, and optimize the PBIX file.

As Power BI continues to innovate with new features that enhance the user experience, it is more important than ever to understand what's available to configure for the report consumer experience.

Knowing the right visuals, DAX, and design to build out a professional scorecard report can be challenging. Learn about some great custom visuals in conjunction with DAX calculations to build out a quality scorecard template to use in your business. The scorecard talk will be broken down into three sections. Section One will cover the basics of the report layout & design, native card visuals, and supporting DAX. Section Two will cover custom visuals, KPI’s, and additional supporting DAX. The final Section Three will cover visualization practices and design principals to clean up the report for delivery to the client.