About
Field notes from the lakehouse.
Hi, I'm David Zebrowitz. I live in the metro Atlanta area, though my family and I are frequently somewhere else, because I am a dance dad. My daughter is a competitive dancer, which means a meaningful share of my weekends happen in convention center ballrooms, cheering and running on hotel coffee. I would not trade it.
When I am not on the road for a competition, I work in data. I have been on the Microsoft data stack since SQL Server 6.5 in the mid-1990s. I was there when OLAP Services and the cubes arrived, I lived through the move to tabular models, I learned MDX and then DAX, and now I am experimenting with frontier AI to push its limits and to see how I can use it to take data and analytics to the next level. The logos and product names have changed many times. My curiosity has not.
On paper: I am a Microsoft Certified Fabric Data Engineer Associate (DP-700) and a Data and Analytics Solution Architect, and I direct a data and analytics consulting practice at a Microsoft partner.
For as long as I can remember, I have learned an application by reverse-engineering the thinking that went into it. I work out what the developers intended and what they meant to make possible, and once I see a tool from that angle it becomes easy to use it well, to troubleshoot it, and now and then to do things with it that other people cannot. Lately I have turned that same instinct on AI. I am learning how it works under the hood, putting different models head to head, and watching which ones are better at what, especially when the goal is building data and analytics solutions.
FluentLake is my personal set of field notes from the lakehouse. I write about Microsoft Fabric, Azure, Synapse, SQL, and AI-assisted engineering with tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI. It is written for the people doing the hands-on work, with the rough edges left in.
A small confession that fits the theme: Claude Code built this site for me.
If you want to compare notes, reach me here: david at fluentlake dot com, or find me on LinkedIn.