We're sponsoring
Databricks Data + AI World Tour 2026
We're sponsoring the Databricks Data + AI World Tour in Dallas, Chicago and Atlanta, and our team will be at every stop. It's a free day of talks and hands-on training, and registration is by application on Databricks' site. If you're going, tell us and we'll find time on the day.
When reports don't agree from one department to the next, or an AI pilot stalled before launch, companies bring us in to fix the data underneath, so every department reports the same number, and to get the AI running on it in production.
The day runs the same at each stop: registration from 8am, the keynote at 9, breakouts and hands-on training on Genie and Lakebase through the afternoon, and a reception in the expo from 5 to 6.
The stops
Held · 14 October 2026
Databricks Data + AI World Tour Dallas
Hilton Anatole, 2201 N Stemmons Fwy, Dallas, TX. 8am to 6pm.
29 October 2026
Databricks Data + AI World Tour Chicago
Sheraton Grand Chicago Riverwalk, 301 E North Water St, Chicago, IL. 8am to 6pm.
10 November 2026
Databricks Data + AI World Tour Atlanta
Atlanta Marriott Marquis, 265 Peachtree Center Ave NE, Atlanta, GA. 8am to 6pm.
The three stops side by side
| Stop | Venue | Also that day | Clock | Evening |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dallas, Wednesday 14 October 2026 | Hilton Anatole | Executive Roundtable | Central Daylight Time | Our dinner in Dallas |
| Chicago, Thursday 29 October 2026 | Sheraton Grand Chicago Riverwalk | Executive Forum | Central Daylight Time, three days before the clocks go back | Our dinner in Chicago |
| Atlanta, Tuesday 10 November 2026 | Atlanta Marriott Marquis | Executive Roundtable | Eastern Standard Time, nine days after the clocks went back | Our dinner in Atlanta |
The day runs the same way at each stop. What differs is the city around it, and each dinner page says what the evening is for there.
Getting a place at a stop
Every stop is free, and you register for each one you want to attend; a place at Dallas doesn't carry over to Chicago. Databricks says the days are designed for its customers, prospective customers and sponsoring partners, and the button on each stop reads "Apply to attend".
The workshops and hands-on training are booked separately and need a reserved seat. Their registration opens closer to each date, so it's worth checking back a week or two out; walk-ups are allowed on the day only if there's room. The executive sessions that run alongside the main day have their own registration too. If a registration goes wrong, Databricks' address for it is world-tour-support@databricks.com, with the city in the message.
A short list for the day
- Apply on the stop's own page, not just the tour page
- Check back for workshop registration about two weeks out, and reserve the Genie or Lakebase seat you want
- If you're an executive sponsor, look at the separate roundtable or forum registration on the same page
- Bring one real question from your own workspace; the hands-on sessions are better with one
- Plan to stay for the expo reception from 5 to 6 if you want to talk to sponsors, which is when the expo hall is the whole programme
Checked on 11 October 2026 against Databricks' World Tour page and FAQ, the Dallas, Chicago and Atlanta registration pages.
Before the Genie and Lakebase training
Building applications on Lakebase
Our first Gilbert Databricks User Group session: an application built live on Lakebase, with a Databricks App on top. Slides and write-up.
A winner in Databricks' Genie-Powered App Challenge
Prove It, by our engineer Ivan Vydrin, won in the Creativity & Originality track of the global contest, judged by Databricks.
Worth knowing before the Genie and Lakebase sessions
Genie's spaces were renamed. Databricks' documentation now calls them Genie Agents, "formerly Genie Spaces", so a slide or a tutorial using either name means the same thing. The same docs advise aiming for five or fewer tables in one, against a hard limit of 50 tables, views or metric views, and say the quality of table and column descriptions in Unity Catalog is critical to how accurate it is. If you're going to the Genie training with a dataset in mind, the descriptions are the part you can fix the week before.
Lakebase is managed Postgres inside Databricks. When we built an application on it live at the first Gilbert Databricks User Group session on 18 September 2026, branching the whole database reached READY in 4.5 seconds, a synced table came online 51 seconds after the call, and writes from the app reached Delta in 10 to 15 seconds. Two seams from that evening are worth taking into the training. History retention was seven days, and past that there's no moment left to branch from. And a table's replica identity has to be set to full before you turn on the change data feed, or the table is skipped. The scripts we ran are public at github.com/Fabric-Pro/fabric-databricks-usergroup.
Checked on 11 October 2026 against Databricks' Genie best practices.
If none of these three dates works
Databricks runs four more North American stops after ours: Toronto on 17 November (through your Databricks account rep rather than an open application), Los Angeles at Anaheim on 18 November, New York City on 19 November, and a government edition in Washington, D.C. on 1 December. We aren't sponsoring those, so the World Tour page on databricks.com is the place to apply. If you can't make any of them and want the conversation anyway, tell us what you're working on.