22-25 April 2026 
Garden Math: IoT Sensors, Fabric Eventhouses, and Data Engineering in Action
Proposed session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
See how telemetry, Raspberry Pis, and Fabric Eventhouses turned a struggling garden into a streaming-data experiment—with patterns you can apply far beyond soil and sunshine.
Session Details
When they’re not working on cloud and data projects, Lenore and her pollen-averse husband Cliff attempt to manage a 20×40 garden allotment with no running water and wildly mixed results. Luckily, this pair of dataphiles has something better than gardening talent: real-time telemetry, Raspberry Pis, and an unreasonable willingness to monitor soil moisture like it’s mission control.
This demo-driven session shows how we built an end-to-end IoT pipeline using Fabric Real-Time Analytics to understand and optimize a very analog system: our garden. We’ll cover:
• Building vs. buying IoT sensors to track key garden inputs like sunlight (lux) and soil moisture
• Routing continuous data into Fabric Real-Time Analytics (Eventhouses) and Real-Time Hub
• Exploring real-time data using KQL
• Leveraging Fabric notebooks to incorporate crop requirements data and pollen-tracking APIs
• Creating automated alerts and dashboards to guide decisions and prevent horticultural disaster
While our goals are more kohlrabi than KPIs, garden management often mirrors real-world business challenges. Attendees will learn practical patterns for ingestion, enrichment, and alert creation using Fabric’s real-time data stack—patterns they can reuse across manufacturing, finance, and operational analytics scenarios.
Will this data-driven gardening actually improve yields? Maybe. But we’ll definitely have the telemetry to explain whatever happens. Expect practical guidance, real-world demos, and just enough gardening chaos to keep things interesting.
This demo-driven session shows how we built an end-to-end IoT pipeline using Fabric Real-Time Analytics to understand and optimize a very analog system: our garden. We’ll cover:
• Building vs. buying IoT sensors to track key garden inputs like sunlight (lux) and soil moisture
• Routing continuous data into Fabric Real-Time Analytics (Eventhouses) and Real-Time Hub
• Exploring real-time data using KQL
• Leveraging Fabric notebooks to incorporate crop requirements data and pollen-tracking APIs
• Creating automated alerts and dashboards to guide decisions and prevent horticultural disaster
While our goals are more kohlrabi than KPIs, garden management often mirrors real-world business challenges. Attendees will learn practical patterns for ingestion, enrichment, and alert creation using Fabric’s real-time data stack—patterns they can reuse across manufacturing, finance, and operational analytics scenarios.
Will this data-driven gardening actually improve yields? Maybe. But we’ll definitely have the telemetry to explain whatever happens. Expect practical guidance, real-world demos, and just enough gardening chaos to keep things interesting.
3 things you'll get out of this session
1. Build a Real-Time IoT Pipeline in Fabric
Understand how sensor data flows through Real-Time Hub, Eventhouses, and KQL to support low-latency monitoring and analytics.
2. Enrich Streaming Data Using Fabric Notebooks
Learn how to blend sensor streams with external datasets—like crop requirements and pollen APIs—to add context and improve insight.
3. Create Automated Alerts and Actionable Dashboards
Implement alerting and visualization patterns that surface issues, guide intervention, and generalize to manufacturing and finance scenarios.
