Retro Data

What is Retro Data?

An anti-bleeding-edge conference: no talks on preview features that might not see the light of day, just practical, accessible talks on fundamental principles and best practices.

Why Retro Data?

Retro Data grew out of two experiences with how fast the data platform world moves. I’d just wrapped up a Hadoop-to-Azure Synapse Analytics migration when Microsoft Fabric was announced - within months all Synapse content and community content had dried up, even though Fabric was still in preview.

The same pattern showed up while curating DataWeekender for November 2023. We normally get 150-200 talk submissions, split fairly evenly across Power BI, SQL Server and data. That year we had 140 submissions overall, but only 3 for Synapse - the only generally available Microsoft data platform product at the time - against 23 for Fabric, which was still in preview.

Watching an entire community stop talking about a supported, GA product in favour of a preview feature was the trigger: it felt like we were running marketing for Microsoft rather than helping people do their jobs today.

Read more on why we started Retro Data .

Alpha launched on 2025-09-20

We hosted 10 data experts on 20th September to talk to us about a range of practical topics. Here is the schedule for that first event:

Where to find more

Become a member of the Meetup Group to be the first to hear about new events, registration is free on Meetup. You can also find the schedule on the website retrodata.live .