The SQLBits 2025 Charity

I am not attending SQLBits this year, the first time ever due to the sad loss of my mum the week before. 

It is incredibly kind of SQLBits to set their charity in celebration of her remarkable life.

SQLBits’ charity of 2025 is the National Museum of Computing, the world’s largest collection of working historic computers, based at Bletchley Park. This fantastic charity has been chosen by longstanding SQLBits helper, Dr Victoria Holt, in honour of her mum, Joan Frances Holt (nee Clark), who she sadly lost last week.

If you would like to donate this is the page here.

Read more about her remarkable story and this remarkable charity here https://lnkd.in/gsjRpFMP

My inspiration in life

Mum’s computing years

At this sad time I wanted to share that my amazing mother, Joan Frances Holt (nee Clark), died on Monday after a 8 month long struggle with arterial disease and blood cancer. A person who was always timid, humble and never talked much about her accomplishments. She started out life being born at the start of the second world war, playing on the streets decimated by incendiary bombs in Portsmouth and only recently discovered more details about her dad who was awarded the Imperial Service Medal (ISM) for long and faithful service in HM Dockyards following his 20 years in the army. She was married to dad for 64 years.

Seven months after leaving school in March 1958, mum started as an Assistant Experimental Officer (AEO) at Aldermaston. A post normally only available to people with degrees, but mums maths was outstanding and was referred for the job by her headmistress at Portsmouth Grammar School. She learnt to program on the Ferranti Mk 1*, with a list of instructions with their binary equivalents, considered an old computer even then. The Ferranti Mk 1* had a large number of valves requiring servicing frequently that could only be run for a short time, which took punch cards. Mum worked on the very latest, state of the art, computer, the IBM 704 mainframe which was among only 2 in the country, the other being at Harwell, mum thought. There were 2 people operating the machine which had several huge magnetic tapes standing in cabinets about 6ft high, a printer, card input and output machines and a central console.  Mum was impressed to work on this. She attended a programming course on the IBM 704 and from printouts asked to draw a graph from the information in 2 columns. The start of modern-day analytics. She learnt how computers were constructed and how the data was stored. The main content of course training included programming the computer to carry out instructions using a symbolic assembly code, to read card input and produce a printout of results.  At the end of the 2 weeks, she had to write a program to calculate sin x. She had to use the machines to type out the program on punched cards, which were then converted to binary by an assembler on the computer.

In contrast, Mum and Dad both were involved in amateur filmmaking of cine films at Harpenden Cine Society in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  Walking in the lake district and travelling in France became a regular occurrence for her, from her 20’s

A small snapshot into a varied and extraordinary life, always an adventurer, and above all family centric and loved so much.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7338818960726929409/

The 2025 AI Index Report

The eighth edition of the AI Index report is out. The 2025 Index is the most comprehensive to date as AI’s influence across society, the economy, and global governance continues to intensify

In the report it covers 

• in-depth analyses of the evolving landscape of AI hardware 
• novel estimates of inference costs 
• new analyses of AI publication and patenting trends. 
• fresh data on corporate adoption of responsible AI practices
• expanded coverage of AI’s growing role in science and medicine. 

Microsoft AI Skills Fest

The Microsoft AI Skills Fest is starting from 8 April 2025 to 28 May 2025 to enhance your AI skills and unlock the future. From experiential content to hackathons, there is a lot of opportunity to learn at all levels. 

Register today: https://msft.it/6042qSzcE

Microsoft Community Fabric Conference 2025 announcements

There were lots of announcements during the FabCon 2025 conference. Here are a few to catch up on. The main Microsoft blog post can be read here: Fueling tomorrow’s AI with new agentic capabilities and security innovations in Fabric

Fabric Data Factory

Fabric Data Factory enables data ingestion through applying data transformations, and orchestrating different data-related activities for modern data management architectures. There were many new features added such as 

• General availability for CI/CD capabilities in Data Factory 
• SPN auth available for pipeline CRUD APIs to secure API apps without needing to use their user token when using the REST API.
• Lakehouse connector to read delta tables, being able to use the information from the deletion vectors to exclude deleted records.
• Support for column mapping, and automated auto-creation of tables with new schemas.

Further reading Fabric Data Factory: What’s New and Latest Roadmap

There were also many product improvements and features for Mirroring in Fabric

Mirroring in Fabric – What’s new

Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse

A really exciting announcement to help migrate from Azure Synapse Analytics was unveiled. This Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse will soon be in preview! The Migration experience is built natively into Fabric and enables the seamless transition from Azure Synapse Analytics (Data Warehouse) to Microsoft Fabric.

Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview)

Copilot for Data Engineering and Data Science

There is a new version of Copilot for Data Engineering and Data Science, a next-generation AI-powered assistant designed to elevate data analysis and coding experience. 

Further reading Enhancing AI productivity in Fabric notebooks with Copilot updates

Copilot F2 and above SKUs 

This is great news for customers on F2 and above SKUs that they will have access to Copilot, Fabric data agents, and more.

hashtag

Azure AI Foundry

Organizations can use Azure AI Foundry to connect customized, conversational agents, created in hashtagMicrosoft Fabric.

Microsoft Purview

There are several new innovations in hashtagMicrosoft Purview for protected, AI-ready data
1. Enhancing Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) support for lakehouse in Fabric to help prevent sensitive data loss by restricting access
2. Expanding DLP policy support for additional Fabric items such as KQL databases and Mirrored databases to show users notification through policy tips when they are working with sensitive data
3. Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Fabric
4. Data observability, now in preview, within Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog

These are a few of the announcements that were of particular interest to me but there were a lot of announcements showcasing the sheer volume of change and growth of Microsoft Fabric.

Reflections on MVP Summit

I had a great time at MVP Summit this week.  I learn a lot of new things. It was great to be able to network, provide customer feedback and talk about the ever evolving Data & AI landscape. With the speed of change seemingly increasing all the time it is good to stop and have a clear week reflecting on things that work and don't work and how to improve our practices when working with data and AI.

I think the biggest take away is that the Data & AI community is always approachable and helpful. There is always someone with deep knowledge of an area who can help and the community just gives up so much time to help others learn and grow from helping children learn coding skills, to creating and running conferences, speaking, mentoring and so much more. 

I have been privileged to be a Data Platform MVP for the last 7 years and would like to thank Microsoft for providing an amazing opportunity to attend the conference.

Reasoning Agents to help with Research and Analysis

There have been some mind blowing changes released today which will aid the future of work. Microsoft have introduced the first-of-their-kind reasoning agents for work.

Researcher

Researcher helps you tackle complex, multi-step research at work. This will help delivering insights with greater quality and accuracy.

Analyst

Analyst thinks like a skilled data scientist looking at raw data to produce insights in minutes.

Introducing Researcher and Analyst in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Read more about Researcher and Analyst

Deep reasoning and agent flows 

Deep reasoning and agent flows in Microsoft Copilot Studio is in preview and offers a comprehensive platform to create, manage, and deploy agents matched to business needs. 

Deep reasoning

Deep reasoning, agents can perform complex tasks and make more accurate decisions. 

Agent flows

Agent flows bring AI workflows into Copilot Studio that enable agents to follow a predefined sequence of actions, ensuring consistent results for structured tasks. 

 Read more