The Fabric & Power BI Manchester User Group is a vibrant local community dedicated to Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, data analytics, and AI. Whether you are a business user looking to improve your reporting or an enterprise data engineer navigating Copilot integrations, this meetup offers immediate, practical value.s.

TALK 1: What is fabric-toolbox and why should I care?
Speaker: Rob Sewell

The fabric-toolbox is Microsoft’s growing open-source repository of accelerators, tools, and scripts built to solve real Fabric challenges. In this session we’ll tour the toolbox — from FUAM, the Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring solution that gives you deep tenant visibility beyond the 14-day Capacity Metrics limit, to FCA for FinOps cost analysis, DAX performance testing, Semantic Model auditing, Data Factory migration assistance, and the MicrosoftFabricMgmt PowerShell module with 295+ cmdlets covering 48 resource types. Whether you’re an admin, developer, or architect, there’s something here for you. Leave knowing exactly which tools to reach for and how to get started.

TALK 2: AI Can Build the Whole Report. Here’s How
Speaker: Duncan Boyne

You’ve seen the demos. One model, one chart, everything works first time. Real builds don’t go like that, and a room full of developers knows it. So I built a complete three-page Power BI report through AI, end to end, without opening Desktop until the final check. This session is the honest account of how. We’ll walk the full pipeline across the three layers most AI content skips:

• The model: tables, relationships, and measures, built by conversation through the Power BI modelling MCP.
• The design: the step nobody covers, wireframing the report in Figma first so it looks designed, not assembled.
• The report: pages, visuals, bindings, and theme generated through pbi-cli.
• Then the part that earns your trust: the twelve things that broke, and the fifteen-second fixes for each. You’ll leave with the real workflow, not the demo.

Three takeaways:

1. The three-layer pipeline for building a Power BI report with AI, including the design layer almost nobody talks about.
2. The specific gotchas that break a Desktop-free build, and how to fix each one fast.
3. A clear sense of which parts of the pipeline are ready today and which still need your hands.

Join us at 5:30pm on the 13th October where we’ll be back at Data Decoded MCR for the second year running! We’ll be at Manchester Central with food, drinks, and – of course – two Snowflake-tastic sessions!

1. Leo Pasta @ Snowflake: The Open Lakehouse Meets AI: Why Iceberg Is the Foundation for Enterprise AI Workload
   Enterprise AI requires governed, fresh, and interoperable data—not just powerful models. This session shows how Apache Iceberg, Horizon Catalog, and catalog federation create an open lakehouse foundation for AI workloads across engines and clouds, without unnecessary copies or vendor lock-in.
2. Paul Gray @ Preventix: The Preventx Snowflake Guide to Success
   Discover how Preventx is unlocking the full power of Snowflake – using Maia to accelerate ETL, Snowflake ML to detect anomalies and forecast outcomes, and Cortex Agents to turn governed health data into smarter decisions and real-world action.

PyData MCR is the Manchester chapter of the International PyData Community.
For Manchester based data people, to share and learn new things. All open data tooling welcome, we are not python focused.

Lightning Talks / Speakers:

reMangable: building software for a closed device – Ram Yadav
The reMarkable 2 looks like a paper notebook. Underneath, It’s a 1 GHz ARM Linux box with 1 GB of RAM, systemd, and a root password printed in its own settings menu. So I built a manga reader for it in Rust.

This talk covers the full path from a stock tablet to a working custom app, and the parts that took real hours.

You’ll leave with an eight-step recipe for any closed-device project: probe before you plan, pin the shim and the toolchain, enable nothing at boot, and write the rescue script before you make anything permanent.

Process Mining from Event Logs to Actionable Insight – Bola Ajenifuja
Everyone talks about processes. Few organisations understand how those processes actually operate in reality.

This talk explores how process mining can help bridge that gap. I’ll discuss where process mining fits within modern data science, the open-source tools available to get started, and lessons learned from building process-mining solutions without relying on expensive specialist platforms.

Whether you’re a data scientist, analyst or simply interested in how work really happens behind the scenes, this session will provide a practical introduction to process mining and its potential applications.

Don’t overthink it – storing timestamps and locations – Emily Price
Trials and tribulations in storing datetime information over a large time span and how to avoid them

Who Harnesses the Harnesses – Shaun Hide
An exploration of Omnigent an open source meta harness that helps you harness the harnesses