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Data Talk Episodes

Data Talk is where we slow down and unpack the entire Microsoft data stack — from self-service to enterprise, from Excel users to lakehouse architects.
This is Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, SQL Server, Synapse-DNA lineage, Dataverse, Lakehouse, Warehouse, Real-Time Analytics, semantic models, data governance, DAX patterns, dataflows, pipelines — and the craft of turning raw data into actual intelligence that impacts business decisions.

We talk about how the pieces fit — not just the tool buttons.
Data modelling logic, semantic modeling best practices, enterprise data product thinking, proper star schema design, delta table decisions, Power BI report performance tuning, how to operationalise Fabric workloads, how to treat Power BI as a “first-class” enterprise platform and not a wild west of “dashboard in five minutes” chaos.

We cover governance deeply: capacity planning, workspaces strategy, managed vs unmanaged lakes, sensitivity labels, lineage, data mesh vs data swamp, self-service enablement frameworks, adoption and literacy programs, federated ownership, and the “balance of freedom vs control” that every organisation struggles with.

We also talk human business dynamics — because data is ultimately not a tech project. It is a decision-making multiplier.
We are here to surface the patterns that create trusted, reliable, explainable, well-governed analytic landscapes — not one-off Power BI hero dashboards.

If it moves data, visualises data, secures data, or makes data make sense — it belongs in Data Talk.
Oct. 23, 2025

Dataverse vs. SharePoint: The Governance Mistake Costing You Time

SharePoint Lists feel “free” and familiar, so teams prototype apps on them—and then accidentally build departments on sand. As lists multiply, you get broken lookups, 5k-item throttling, rogue permissions, attachment bloat, and schema drift. Governance collapses quietly: no environment isolation, i…
Oct. 22, 2025

Your Fabric Data Lake Is Too Slow: The NVMe Fix

Your Fabric and Power Platform workloads aren’t slow because of Spark or DAX—they’re slow because your data lives far from your compute. Managed storage adds network hops, caps IOPS, and taxes every read/write with latency. The fix isn’t “more nodes”; it’s proximity. Azure Container Storage v2 (ACS…
Oct. 20, 2025

Master Dataverse Security: Stop External Leaks Now

Your Power App didn’t get “hacked”—it was over-permitted. Treating Dataverse like SharePoint (big buckets, broad roles) turns guest access into a data breach waiting to happen. Dataverse is a relational fortress built on granular privileges (Create/Read/Write/Delete/Append/Append To/Assign/Share), …
Oct. 20, 2025

Stop Using Power BI Wrong: The $10,000 Data Model Fix

Your dashboards aren’t just slow—they’re expensive. Every bloated column, lazy import, and tangled relationship silently taxes your Power BI Premium capacity and your team’s time. That inefficiency adds up to real money—often five figures a year. The cure isn’t a plug-in; it’s architecture. Move fr…
Oct. 16, 2025

AI Factory vs. Chaos: Which Runs Your Enterprise?

AI is not “just another app” you park on general-purpose servers. Enterprise AI behaves like an ecosystem — volatile workloads, bursty data, exotic compute, and constant model evolution. That’s why so many AI pilots glow in the lab then die in production. The five tells that you’re no longer dealin…
Oct. 11, 2025

The Hidden Engine Inside Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric fundamentally changes how Power BI handles data. With OneLake and Direct Lake, Power BI can now query lakehouse tables directly with performance similar to Import mode — without creating duplicate copies or maintaining complex refresh cycles. The winning Fabric pattern is simple…
Oct. 8, 2025

Stop Blaming Users—Your Pipeline Is the Problem

In a recent podcast, Mirko Peters discussed the challenges of choosing between Synapse Link and Dataflow Gen 2 for Dataverse pipelines, emphasizing the importance of making informed decisions to avoid project failures. The conversation highlighted issues that arise when multiple teams create overla…
Oct. 6, 2025

I Replaced 500 Measures Instantly—Here’s How

In this episode, we dive into how to replace measures in Power BI using DAX, helping you simplify your data model, improve report performance, and create more accurate, maintainable calculations. We explain what measures are, why they’re essential for interactive Power BI reports, and how they diff…
Oct. 5, 2025

Licensing Nightmares: Why Self-Service BI Costs More Than You Think

In this episode, we break down Microsoft Power BI’s pricing structure to help you understand the different license options, costs, and features available across the Power BI ecosystem. Whether you're comparing Power BI Free, Pro, Premium Per User, or Premium Per Capacity, this guide gives you a cle…
Oct. 4, 2025

Unlocking Power BI: The True Game Changer for Teams

In this episode, we explore how Power BI and Microsoft Teams work together to create a seamless, collaborative analytics experience. We break down how Power BI’s powerful data visualization capabilities integrate directly into Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to share insights, discuss repor…
Oct. 3, 2025

Microsoft Fabric Explained: No Code, No Nonsense

In this episode, we dive into Microsoft Fabric, the unified data and analytics platform reshaping how organizations manage, analyze, and act on their data. Designed to bring Power BI, Data Factory, Azure Synapse, and other Microsoft services into one integrated environment, Fabric simplifies everyt…
Oct. 1, 2025

R or T-SQL? One Button Changes Everything

In this episode, we dive into how R and SQL Server work together to create a powerful data analytics workflow. You’ll learn why SQL Server excels at storing, organizing, and retrieving large datasets, while R specializes in statistical analysis, visualization, and machine learning. When combined, t…
Sept. 30, 2025

You're Flying Blind Without Business Central Telemetry and howto fix it with Power BI

In this episode, we explore how organizations can turn Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry into powerful insights using Microsoft Power BI. Telemetry is one of the most valuable—and often underused—capabilities in Business Central. It captures performance data, user behavior, errors, and system…
Sept. 29, 2025

Is Your Dataflow Reusable—or a One-Trick Disaster?

In this episode, we dive into one of the core engines behind Microsoft Fabric’s modern analytics ecosystem—Dataflows Gen2. We explore how this next-generation data ingestion and transformation tool is shaping the way organizations prepare, refine, and deliver data for analytics. We start with an…
Sept. 28, 2025

Microsoft Fabric’s Digital Twin: The Fix for Messy Data… or Another Headache?

In the evolving world of Microsoft Fabric, the Digital Twin Builder preview emerges like a quiet shift that changes everything without announcing itself loudly. You start by taking the world you already know—machines, rooms, sensors, movements, transactions—and giving it a second life inside the Fa…
Sept. 26, 2025

Power BI Collaboration: Herding Cats or GitHub Fix?

power bi keeps showing up in the background of every conversation about data because it does something most tools struggle with: it doesn’t just help you look at numbers, it helps people work together around them. the reports, the dashboards, the visuals—those are great, but the real power is how e…
Sept. 26, 2025

The Star Schema Trick All Pros Use (But Won’t Say)

when people first open power bi, they usually jump straight into visuals. charts, slicers, maps—it feels like that’s where the real action is. but the longer you work with it, the more you realize that the real magic is happening underneath, in the way the data is shaped and modeled. the model is t…
Sept. 25, 2025

Fabric Data Activator vs Power BI Alerts: No Contest

the moment people hear “data activator,” they assume it’s just another automation tool tucked somewhere inside microsoft fabric. but once you actually see it in action, it feels more like watching data wake up. instead of dashboards that wait for someone to notice a problem, the activator notices i…
Sept. 25, 2025

Deploy Power BI Like a Pro—No More Guesswork

every organization that takes data seriously eventually hits the same crossroads: the reports are getting bigger, the models are getting more complex, more people are asking for changes, and suddenly a single workspace with everyone pressing publish just doesn’t work anymore. this is usually the mo…
Sept. 24, 2025

How T-SQL Saves You From Begging IT

people often hear the words sql and t-sql thrown around as if they’re interchangeable, and for a while they feel like they are. you write a query, you get your results, and everything seems straightforward. but the deeper you go into database work, the more you notice that not all sql behaves the s…
Sept. 24, 2025

How Power BI Turns SharePoint Chaos Into Clarity

sharepoint has this way of becoming everything and nothing all at once. a place meant for structure slowly turning into a maze of lists, libraries, document versions, old folders nobody remembers creating, and columns added by someone who left the company four years ago. people rely on it because i…
Sept. 23, 2025

The Dataverse Migration Nobody Wants (But Needs)

This episode cuts through the confusion around Dataverse data migration and explains, in plain language, how to move data between environments without breaking your schema, losing your relationships, or waking up to a support queue full of duplicate records. You’ll hear why data migration has quiet…
Sept. 22, 2025

How Data Goblins Wreck Copilot For Everyone

This episode goes straight into the uncomfortable truth behind Microsoft Copilot: the same AI that accelerates your workflows can also expose your most sensitive data if you don’t govern it correctly. We unpack how Copilot for Microsoft 365 pulls information from across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams,…
Sept. 20, 2025

The Power BI Gateway Horror Story No One Warned You About

Power BI Gateway is the secret weapon that makes it possible to bring secure, on-premises data into the cloud power of Microsoft Power BI without moving anything outside your firewall. In this episode, we break down how the on-premises data gateway works, why organizations rely on it, and how it se…