Hiya! I’ve been meaning to write this one for a little while now — life has just been a lot! Between FabCon, SQLCon, and MVP Summit all stacking up, my travels have been non-stop and my brain has only just started catching up. But I’ve been thinking about this post, so here we go.
It Sold Out
First things first — it sold out! And that means so much to me, because RTI feels like the hidden gem of the Microsoft Fabric workloads. It’s there, it’s powerful, but the perception is that not many people are using it. Except the stats don’t lie — 50% of the 31,000 organisations using Microsoft Fabric are using RTI. That’s not a niche feature, that’s a movement. And seeing 169 people register AND show up for a full day hands-on workshop? That was just amazing to see.
The Conversations Were Everything
What I loved most wasn’t the labs (though those were great — more on that in a sec). It was the conversations happening throughout the day. People from completely different industries coming to the table with their own challenges, their own data landscapes, and starting to see how Real-Time Intelligence could fit into their world.
Some of the industries where the use cases really sparked great discussion:
- Manufacturing — monitoring equipment in real time, catching anomalies before they become failures
- Utilities — managing grid data, consumption patterns, and operational events as they happen
- Higher Education — student engagement signals, campus operations, real-time reporting
RTI is one of those capabilities where once people start thinking in real-time, they can’t stop. The “what if we could see that as it happens?” conversations are my favourite kind.
What We Got Hands-On With
The labs were designed to give attendees genuine, first-hand experience with RTI from the ground up. Here’s what we worked through together:
- Ingesting streaming data into Fabric
- Using shortcuts to connect to static data sources alongside real-time streams
- Incorporating multiple data sources into a single RTI solution
- Achieving medallion architecture within RTI using KQL update policies
- Configuring retention settings to manage data lifecycle in real-time workloads
Getting people to the point where they’d actually built something end-to-end — that’s the whole point. Reading about RTI is one thing; having it running in your hands is something else entirely.
The Behind-the-Scenes Heroes 🙌
None of this happens without some serious work going on behind the curtain. Managing a tenant and capacity for 169 simultaneous attendees doing hands-on labs is not a small feat — and I want to give a huge shoutout to Alex Powers and Edgar Cotte for making sure everything ran smoothly on that front. The experience was seamless for attendees because of the work these two put in. Genuinely grateful. 💜
And we were also incredibly lucky to have support from the Microsoft product team throughout the day — Devang Shah, Brad Watts, and Christopher Schmidt were there with us from start to finish. Having that level of product expertise in the room to answer the curly questions? Invaluable. Thank you all so much.
And a huge, heartfelt thank you to Minni Walia for the opportunity to share the stage in delivering this workshop. It meant the world. 💜
The Best Part
I was also super thankful for attendees who provided feedback during the day — it meant we could pivot on the fly and make the experience even better for everyone in the room. That kind of real-time input is so valuable.
I’ve been getting messages from attendees since the day wrapped, and honestly it’s made my day. Knowing that people left with a better understanding of RTI, with something they built themselves, and with ideas already forming about how they’ll apply it — that’s everything.
I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with. And I really, really hope this is just the first of many more workshops like this.
