Data on Fire: A Hands-On Intro to Spark in Fabric

The December Ohio North Database Training user group meeting will be held on January 6th, 2025 at 5:00PM. This will be a HYBRID event and we will be joined online by Jason Romans.

You're welcome to come meet in-person at our meeting location, the offices of Improving at

6000 Freedom Square Dr,
Unit 110,
Independence, OH 44131

Teams Link if anyone needs it after RSVP-ing for in person.

If you would like to subscribe to our email list outside of Meetup, we have changed platforms recently and you will need to register here in Kit instead to receive emails.

Agenda:

5:00 PM EST: Online and in-person meeting begins with a social hour. This is an unstructured hour where you can join us to catch up and meet other group members before the session starts. There will be food brought in for in-person attendees.

6:00 PM EST: Updates and announcements, followed by our feature presentation. See below for presentation details.

7:30 PM EST: Optionally after the main presentations, the in-person crowd may go out for snacks and drinks at a local establishment.

We hope to see you there!

Session Abstract
Data on Fire: A Hands-On Intro to Spark in Fabric
Curious about Apache Spark but not sure where to start? This hands-on session introduces you to Spark in Microsoft Fabric Notebooks—a powerful and accessible way to process and analyze big data using familiar tools in the Microsoft ecosystem.

We’ll break down key Spark concepts like distributed computing, DataFrames, and lazy evaluation, then show how they come to life inside Fabric’s notebook experience. You’ll see practical demos that cover loading, transforming, and analyzing large datasets—while leveraging Fabric’s modern data stack, including OneLake, Dataflows, and Pipelines.

You’ll also learn how to choose between Spark and pure Python notebooks in Fabric, based on execution needs, data integration, and use case fit.

Whether you're a SQL pro, BI developer, or data engineer, this session will give you the tools and confidence to start using Spark in your own projects—no cluster management required.

*Please note, that we will be using Microsoft Teams for the online portion of this meeting. You may want to join a few minutes early to ensure you do not have any issues. If you are attending in person, there are large TVs at the office, and you do not need to bring a laptop or use Teams.