Russ Houberg

Transforming a 30-year-old monolithic analytics platform is as much about mindset as it is about technology. Our legacy, batch-based system—with its rigid relational model and high maintenance costs—could no longer keep up with growing data, client demands, or innovation needs. In this session, we share how we reimagined investment analytics with a cloud-native architecture modern ingestion and ETL pipelines using Spark Declarative Pipelines (SDP), dimensional modeling, and a modern OLAP engine. We’ll highlight key design decisions, migration patterns, and how we preserved trusted reporting while improving data quality, transparency, and self-service. Attendees will learn practical strategies to de-risk modernization, accelerate delivery, and unlock new analytical capabilities without disrupting mission-critical operations.

Many organizations have rich SharePoint data but struggle to use it at scale for intelligence, reporting, and automation. In this demo-heavy session, we demonstrate how to leverage valuable SharePoint content as a first-class data source for data intelligence and analytics by ingesting it into your lakehouse. Using the new Lakeflow Connect SharePoint connector, we will demonstrate incremental, governed pipelines (via Unity Catalog) that ingest both structured data (Excel, CSV, lists) and unstructured content (PDFs, Office files, images). Data lands as streaming tables enriched with SharePoint metadata to power downstream analytics, search, and AI. We will walk through five low-lift, high-impact patterns: driving an AI-powered BI dashboard from Excel and list data, summarizing and analyzing PDF reports, querying PowerPoint decks via natural language in a secure Genie Room, OCR’ing scanned images for text extraction, and consolidating many CSV reports into a single streaming table.