Return From The Summer Interlude

Hello!

Returning from our Summer Interlude, we are back at ASOS.

For those of you wondering; beer and pizza will be provided courtesy of Sabin.io.

The SQL Supper Team

Agenda

18:00 - 18:30 : Doors open

18:30 - 19:00 : Gary Strange - CosmosDB Insights

19:00 - 19:30 : Pizza, beer and networking

19:30 - 20:30 : Chris Webb - Q&A in Power BI: gimmick or game-changer?

CosmosDB Insights

A session covering; System Topology, Data Persistence, Indexing and Consistency levels. The content is targeted at engineers that have experience working with RDBMS technologies and ACID transactions. I’ll attempt to explain the fundamental differences between the old world of pessimistic concurrency and the new world of semantic guarantees. Candidates should have a basic understanding of Azure CosmosDB.

Gary Strange is a Lead Data Engineer at ASOS, a leading online fashion destination for 20-somethings. He works with 11 teams across two domains, advising the architects and engineers that design and build ASOS microservices. He is responsible for helping the engineers understand and ultimately be successful, developing services that harness the benefits of polyglot persistence. Gary has over 2 decades of data engineering experience gained at companies in the Broadcast, Exchange Trading, Investment Banking and high-volume Retail industries.

Q&A in Power BI: gimmick or game-changer?

You have probably seen the Q&A feature in Power BI demoed many times, but is it just a demo feature? Do users really want to type questions and see Power BI visuals generated for them automatically? In this session you’ll learn:

What Q&A is, where it can be accessed by users and who it might be useful to
How the design of your dataset and reports can influence how well Q&A works
How advanced features like Synonyms and editing the Linguistic Schema file can enable more complex interactions
Whether it’s worth your time and effort to use Q&A in your Power BI deployment