If you're looking to master SQL Server, Power BI, or Microsoft Fabric, attending the SQL Saturday event in Austin, Texas, is one of the smartest moves you can make for your career. Note: Austin, Texas, is hosting their event on May 2nd and 3rd. Here's why:
Free, High-Quality Training
SQL Saturday events are renowned for offering a full day of technical sessions that are entirely free of charge (pay for lunch). Whether a beginner or an experienced professional, you will find sessions tailored to your skill level, led by Microsoft employees, industry experts, and Microsoft MVPs passionate about sharing their knowledge. This includes all-day hands-on workshops (usually a paid add-on) and in-depth explorations of the latest features of SQL Server, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric, ensuring you stay current with the rapidly evolving Microsoft data platform.
Free, High-Quality Training
SQL Saturday events are renowned for offering a full day of technical sessions that are entirely free of charge (pay for lunch). Whether a beginner or an experienced professional, you will find sessions tailored to your skill level, led by Microsoft employees, industry experts, and Microsoft MVPs passionate about sharing their knowledge. This includes all-day hands-on workshops (usually a paid add-on) and in-depth explorations of the latest features of SQL Server, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric, ensuring you stay current with the rapidly evolving Microsoft data platform.
Learn from The Experts!
Speakers at SQL Saturday events are practitioners who solve real business problems with these technologies on a daily basis. You will gain practical insights, best practices, and tips you can immediately apply to your job to add value instantly. You will see how other companies and consultants leverage SQL Server, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric to drive their business success.
Networking Opportunities in Austin, Texas
Experts go to and share their knowledge at SQL Saturdays because of their desire to connect, share, and learn together. These connections lead to mentorship, job opportunities, and lasting professional relationships. SQL Saturdays are more than just technical content. It is a community gathering. You will connect with fellow data professionals, speakers, and recruiters. The supportive, grassroots atmosphere makes it easy for newcomers to feel at home and get involved. You never know, your next boss might be sitting next to you in a session.
Career and Community Growth
Attending SQL Saturday is a proven way to invest in your professional development. My company, ProcureSQL, is a living example. We would not exist without the technical and professional development at SQL Saturdays. It is a key reason why we continue to invest time and money to help these events succeed.You will sharpen your technical skills and gain exposure to leadership and volunteering opportunities that can accelerate your career. Additionally, you will become part of a global network of data professionals passionate about learning and sharing knowledge. In short, if you want to learn SQL Server, Power BI, or Microsoft Fabric, SQL Saturday offers an unbeatable combination of free training, expert guidance, and community support. Do not miss your chance to level up. Join us at SQL Saturday Austin on May 2nd and 3rd, 2025.
https://procuresql.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ignite2017-e1506352117985.jpg640480John Sterrett/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Data-Architecture-as-a-Service-with-ProcureSQL.pngJohn Sterrett2025-04-22 19:41:042025-09-06 20:41:11Austin, Texas Best SQL Server Training in 2025
Older legacy systems and legacy applications are crucial to a business’s functionality. They’re the backbone that holds a business together, whether they are a bank’s mainframe holding customer accounts, a factory’s SAP system handling inventory and payroll, or a retail company’s POS system for in-store sales.
As technology advances, these applications must be upgraded or replaced to keep up with the competition.
Legacy Applications Data: things to know.
Upgrading your legacy systems will make your company more efficient, resilient to threats, and scalable. This results in a significant bump in cost savings from reduced hardware and maintenance expenses, plus a better user experience for both employees using the system and customers.
To upgrade, though, you need to make a big decision. Do you migrate your entire system or upgrade/modernize the one you currently have?
Each has significant pros and cons, and it’s key to understand both before you make your decision.
Legacy Application Migrations
First, let’s talk about migrating your legacy applications.
Migrating means moving your data to a new environment, such as a cloud platform or a new system. Having a data architect on hand for this engagement helps reduce risk and improves the rate of a successful migration.
The immediate benefit of doing this is getting a fresh start with all the benefits the new platform has to offer.
It’s a complete overhaul that will jumpstart your company and allow it to benefit from cutting-edge technology immediately.
Because it’s a complete overhaul, though, there can be some pitfalls that you must be aware of.
First and foremost, migrating your data and systems is a considerable project. Old data often needs to be reformatted for new systems, as it was written in old code or is for outdated relational databases. Your data migration can be accomplished by refactoring or completely rewriting the data, which may take longer.
Add to this the investment in new software and training, and you have a more expensive, long-term project ahead of you.
Fortunately, the long-term benefits of migrating your system outweigh any cost you may have upfront.
The return on investment from a core business system migration has been shown to pay itself off quickly after adoption. For instance, organizations that migrated to Atlassian’s cloud technology reported an ROI of 155% over three years, with an initial payback period of only six months.
Furthermore, with detailed planning, you can prevent business disruptions and data loss during migration.
To prevent business disruption, the new system should be rolled out gradually during non-peak hours to minimize the impact. Several layers of data backup and heightened security now exist to guarantee the safety of customer and company data. A data architect is crucial to executing your go-live and rollback scenarios smoothly.
Application Modernization for Legacy Applications
When it comes to modernization for legacy applications, you’ll have a quicker turnaround to upgrade your system without a complete overhaul and the full benefits of migration.
Think of migration as buying a new car, while modernization is tuning up your old one.
Because of the project’s smaller scale, modernization mitigates any setbacks that may accompany a migration.
You’re keeping your old system, so you’ll save money on new software and training because it is familiar. Modernization focuses on small, gradual changes that allow you to keep your systems running while improvements are made.
The major drawback is that modernization has a smaller return on investment than migration. You won’t have access to all the benefits a totally new platform can offer.
In addition, as your system becomes increasingly outdated, you may eventually need to migrate to a new system. Modernization can delay this, but migration may one day become inevitable.
Making Your Decision Between the Two
Regardless of your choice in managing your legacy applications, data architects or database administrators should be part of your team to ensure your selection is executed correctly.
To make your decision between migration and modernization, see where you lie on the following two questions:
What are your current needs? If your current system can’t keep up with your growth or you eventually want to scale, migration would be your way forward. Modernization is your choice if your current situation works but needs minor improvements.
What’s your long-term plan and budget? Migration will require more upfront costs, but it has proven to return much more on its investment than modernization. Modernization is less cost-heavy upfront, can be implemented faster, and will deliver short-term improvements.
If you are unsure of any of these questions and need better insight into the best path forward, ProcureSQL can help. We are happy to chat with you one-on-one, or you can contact us today by clicking here to get started on your path to migration or modernization.
https://procuresql.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Procure-SQL-Do-I-need-a-Backup-System-Database.jpg5631090Kon Melamud/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Data-Architecture-as-a-Service-with-ProcureSQL.pngKon Melamud2025-04-16 15:48:002025-09-06 20:47:59Legacy Applications: Should They Stay Or Should They Go?
I attended the Microsoft Fabric conference for the first time last week. I wanted to provide a guide that CIOs and CEO’s could leverage to understand how they could utilize these new announcements at the 2025 Fabric Conference to obtain a competitive advantage. To be transparent, I was skeptical because Microsoft consistently changes or rebrands its analytics platform every three to five years. We have gone from Parallel Data Warehouses (PDW) to Analytics Platform Services (APS), Azure Services, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Azure Synapse Analytics, bringing us to Microsoft Fabric.
John Sterrett from ProcureSQL attends the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Conference.
To my surprise, after this conference, I have gone from seeing Fabric as Microsoft’s current take on Analytics to how it will stand out as an analytics platform of choice for people who want a simple, quick, and easy way to do analytics with the tools they already love using.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will only be as practical as the quality of your data. Garbage in still equals garbage out, or as I like to call it, building a trusted dumpster fire. Preparing your data for AI will be the key to success with your AI Projects. Microsoft clearly understands this by focusing on preparing your data for AI with fabric mirroring, fabric databases, and SQL Server 2025. My takeaway is that you won’t have to get ready if you stay ready.
Copilot for all Fabric SKUs
Microsoft is committed to giving more people access to its AI tools as a commitment to this. In the coming weeks, users on F2 fabric compute and above can utilize Copilot. Additionally, you can use Fabric Copilot capacity, a new feature that simplifies setup, user management, and access to Copilot across different tiers.
Why Fabric Mirroring Is A Game Changer
Those following us aren’t new to the concept and advantages of fabric mirroring. One of the biggest mistakes we see that multiplies the odds of your analytics projects failing is incorrectly landing your data into your analytics platform of choice. Either the data is missing, has been transformed incorrectly, or is no longer being received.
Microsoft provides a feature called “mirroring” to help solve the problem of getting your data into your landing zone. With Azure SQL Databases and fabric databases, it’s as easy as a few clicks. Coming soon, you will have similar experiences with PostgreSQL in Azure, Oracle, SQL Server in VMs, and on-premises. What about other apps/data stores? Open mirroring is coming soon, and you can leverage it to get your other data into the Fabric landing zone.
Multi-Cloud Shortcuts
Microsoft has partnered with Snowflake to provide iceberg-formatted data across Fabric, eliminating data movement and duplication. You can use a shortcut to point directly to an Iceberg table written using Snowflake in Azure. Snowflake has also added the ability to write Iceberg tables directly into OneLake.
Apache Iceberg tables can be used with Fabric due to a feature called metadata virtualization. Behind the scenes, this feature utilizes Apache XTable.
The key takeaway is that users can now work on the same data using both Snowflake and Fabric, without requiring data movement or duplication. Letting your data professionals utilize the tools they use best is a huge win.
Fabric Databases
Microsoft Fabric Databases is the new kid on the block, and it’s already seeing traction as the first fully SaaS-ifyed database offering. Fabric databases are built for ease of use as a unified data platform. You can create databases in just a few clicks and have zero maintenance to worry about, as Microsoft fully manages the databases. Fabric database data is automatically mirrored into OneLake for analytics.
The key takeaway is that you can utilize Microsoft Fabric for application development and eliminate the need for a database infrastructure as a service MSP/partner. You can eliminate this cost as you should always get exponential value from your data MSP (what we built our practice focusing on), not just body for monitoring or keeping the lights up and running.
SQL Server 2025
Microsoft announced some updates to SQL Server 2025 at the keynote and in other breakout sessions. While it is still in private preview, it was easy to see how anyone who could write T-SQL could leverage models and vectors without needing extensive knowledge of vectors or algorithms. GraphQL will enable developers to access API endpoints and consume data, similar to most other APIs. JSON will be treated as a first-class citizen, with its data type and indexes, to help developers access their JSON data quickly and easily.
With SQL Server 2025, you can mirror your data to Microsoft Fabric with Zero ETL, zero code, our OneLake, and near real-time mirroring at no additional cost, without requiring change data capture. This will help reduce your total cost of ownership. There will be no additional compute costs for Availability Groups; continue to utilize your Fabric compute.
The key takeaway is that Microsoft continues investing in making SQL
Server more accessible from the ground to the cloud. SQL Server will continue to make it easier to help you utilize your data inside and outside the relational platform.
Other notable features
Autoscale Billing for Spark optimizes Spark job costs by offloading your data’s extraction, load, and transformation to a serverless billing model.
Command-line interfaceFabric CLI is now in preview. Built on fabric APIs, it is designed for automation. There will be less clicky-clicky and more scripts that you can version control.
API and Terraform Integration Automate key aspects of your fabric platform now by utilizing Terraform. If you have used it with Azure, get ready to use it with Fabric as well.
CI/CD enhancements. With Fabric’s git integration, multiple developers can frequently make incremental workspace updates. You could also utilize variable libraries and delivery pipelines to help get your changes vetted and tested quickly through your various testing environments.
User Data Functions Fabric user data functions is a platform that allows you to host and run applications on Fabric. Data engineers can write custom business logic and embed it into the fabric ecosystem.
Statistics That Caught My Attention
Microsoft Fabric supports over 19,000 organizations, including 74% of Fortune 500 companies.
Power BI has over 275k users, including 95% of Fortune 500 companies
45k consultants trained, 23k partner certifications in its first year
One billion new apps will be built in the next five years.
87% of leaders believe AI will give their organization a competitive edge
30,000+ fabric certifications completed in twelve months
I will be back next year and will provide you with another write-up, similar to the one I produced this week, in case you are unable to attend.
About ProcureSQL
ProcureSQL is the industry leader in providing data architecture as a service, enabling companies to harness their data and grow their business. ProcureSQL is 100% onshore in the United States and supports the four quadrants of data, including application modernization, database management, data analytics, and data visualization. ProcureSQL works as a guide, mentor, leader, and implementer to provide innovative solutions to drive better business outcomes for all businesses. Click here to learn more about our service offerings.
Do you have questions about leveraging AI, Microsoft Fabric, or the Microsoft Data Platform? You can chat with me for free one-on-one, or contact the team. We would love to share our knowledge and experience with you.
https://procuresql.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/ProcureSQL-at-Fabcon-2025.webp1024768John Sterrett/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Data-Architecture-as-a-Service-with-ProcureSQL.pngJohn Sterrett2025-04-09 13:54:022025-09-06 20:59:23The CIO’s Guide to Leveraging Microsoft Fabric for Competitive Advantage
You will sharpen your technical skills and gain exposure to leadership and volunteering opportunities that can accelerate your career. Additionally, you will become part of a global network of data professionals passionate about learning and sharing knowledge. In short, if you want to learn SQL Server, Power BI, or Microsoft Fabric, SQL Saturday offers an unbeatable combination of free training, expert guidance, and community support. Do not miss your chance to level up. Join us at SQL Saturday Austin on May 2nd and 3rd, 2025. 
