Data Platform User Group (BI, Azure)

** This event is at a new location - Wizu Workspace - The Leeming Building
[ https://wizuworkspace.com/the-leeming-building/ ] **

Join fellow IT Professionals for an evening of knowledge sharing and networking in an open, friendly environment.

17:30 – 18:00 – Networking (drinks)
18:00 – 19:00 – Robin Lester (Microsoft)
19:00 – 19:20 – Break (pizza / top up)
19:20 – 20:20 – Simon Whitely (Adatis)
20:20 – 20:30 – Off t’pub.

** Robin Lester (Microsoft) **
Robin Lester is a Cloud Solutions Architect (CSA) at Microsoft in One Commercial Partner (OCP). Working in the industry for over 20 years, focusing on Data tools such as SQL Server and AI technologies. Having worked as both a Premier Field Engineer and a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft Robin has a deep technical background in everything related to Data and AI.

Azure Cloud Databases Roadmap and Discovery

In this session we will discuss recent announcements and releases in the SQL Azure space. Including but not limited to Azure SQL Datawarehouse improvements; Azure SQL Database Hyperscale; Machine Learning Services in Azure SQL Database and Power BI; data masking strategies and pricing improvements. We will talk about why the services work the way they do and why you would use them in different architectures.

** Simon Whitely (Adatis) **
Bio:
As Chief Architect with Adatis Consulting, Simon has been working with the Microsoft BI Stack for a decade, starting off building traditional warehouses with SSIS, SSRS and SSAS. He has since turned his head to the cloud and now spends his time advocating new methods of getting insight to the right people using Microsoft Azure’s advanced analytics platform. Whether it's automating file ingestion into Azure Data Lakes, applying massive compute via SQLDW & Azure Databricks or orchestrating these pipelines via Data Factory, he can help.

Simon is a strong advocate of the use of modern development practices in the data world (we actually are developers, whether we like it or not) and runs the Surrey Data Platform Group & co-organises the London PASS Chapter.

Abstract:
Azure Databricks brings a PaaS offering of Apache Spark, which allows for blazing fast data processing, interactive querying and hosting of ML models all in one place! Most of the buzz is around Data Science & AI - what about the humble data engineer who wants to harness the in-memory processing power within their ETL pipelines?

This session focuses on Azure Databricks as your data ingestion, transformation and curation tool of choice.

We will:
Introduce the Databricks service & language options available
Discuss the hosting & compute options available
Demonstrate a sample data processing task

Demonstrate pipeline management & orchestration
Review the wider architectures and extension patterns

The session is aimed at Data Engineers seeking to put the Azure Databricks technology in the right context and learn how to use the service.

We will not be covering the python programming language in detail.