22-25 April 2026

Richard Conway

My name is Richard Conway. I'm a Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Azure. I'm a Director of Elastacloud which is a Data Science consultancy working across key business sectors such as retail, finance, engineering and others. As well as my role in business, I'm an author of books and courses and a key contributor to Apache open source projects with a love for all things cloud and data. Over the years I've become proficient in C++, C#, Java, Scala, Python and R and I mix and match these skills for my customers and community on a daily basis. I love speaking to new audiences on aspects of cloud, data science and data platform and have spoken all across Europe over the last few years. I'm a strong advocate of communities and over the years founded @ukazure and a few others. As an advocate for child education in IT I've been working closely with Code Club in the UK. My most recent community contribution has been AzureCraft, an annual two day event for developers, parents and kids to teach the Cloud and Programming through Minecraft.

Richard Conway's Sessions

Databricks vs Fabric: When to choose, when to combine, and why it’s confusingSQLBits 2026

Join this session to move beyond opinions and slide decks. Through practical demos, you’ll see how both platforms behave when solving the same real-world problems, and where the differences actually matter in delivery.

Fuzzy Matching with Azure OpenAI Vector EmbeddingsSQLBits 2025

This session will look to use new Vector Embeddings features in Azure Services, prompt engineering along with new AI patterns and practices to build AI-led fuzzy matching for Enterprise use cases. We'll look at novel non-search use cases where embeddings become a powerful and quick tool to solve a common class of problem in a new way.