Welcome

Passionately curious about Data, Databases and Systems Complexity. Data is ubiquitous, the database universe is dichotomous (structured and unstructured), expanding and complex. Find my Database Research at SQLToolkit.co.uk . Microsoft Data Platform MVP

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing" Einstein



Thursday 7 November 2024

PASS 24 Data Community Summit

This week it is PASS 24 Data Community Summit







The Microsoft Keynote was entitled, Fuel AI innovation with Azure Databases.

The session abstract: Data is the fuel for innovation, driving the development of transformative AI applications. In this keynote, join Shireesh and the Microsoft engineering team as they explore harnessing the power of data across the Azure databases portfolio to drive ground breaking advancements. Take your first step on the journey with vector search, multi-agent apps and more and learn to unlock new patterns like retrieval augmented generation (RAG).  Explore the latest database innovations in SQL Server, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL that enhance operational efficiency, deliver personalized user experiences, and revolutionize the way we interact with technology. 

There were some great announcements 

Announcing

  • SSMS 21 and Copilot in SSMS
  • Azure SQL Database Hyperscale enhancements (Storage up to 128TB (GA) Log throughput rate up to 150 MB per second (Preview) , Continuous priming (Preview))

Preview

  • Next gen general purpose on Azure SQL Managed Instance (32TB of storage, 500 DBs, Lower storage latency, improved storage importance, customisable I/O performance)
  • Migration Assessment from SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc
  • Mirroring in Fabric for Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB
  • In-database embedding generation
  • Vector Indexing and search in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL
  • Native vector type and functions in Azure SQL Database (Available now)
  • DiskANN indexing in Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Generally available

  • Bi-directional disaster recovery with link feature in Azure SQL Managed Instance
  • Flat and quantized flat vector indexes in Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL
  • Serverless auto-pause delay to 15 min
  • Azure AI extension
  • Hyperscale elastic pools
  • Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB enhancements

Tuesday 5 November 2024

Data Toboggan Alpine Coaster 2024

Alpine Coaster is our shorter 3 time zone end of year unconference event. You know we like to mix things up with this version of Data Toboggan, so this time:

Sessions are around 20 minutes long.

There are three session editions to join. APAC 7:30 8:40 | EMEA 12:30 - 1:40 | AMER 5:30 - 6:10 GMT, join one or all

Please note, there will be no recordings taken on the day. We feel that kinda takes the pressure off a little for this short session more interactive type of event.

Register now for the Alpine Coaster event: Friday 8 November 2024

APAC Edition - https://www.meetup.com/data-toboggan/events/304285946/

EMEA Edition - https://www.meetup.com/data-toboggan/events/304285953/

AMER Edition - https://www.meetup.com/data-toboggan/events/304285956/





Monday 21 October 2024

Microsoft AI Tour London 2024

The Microsoft AI Tour in London on 21 October 2024 talked about solving the biggest challenges and uncovering new opportunities to empower your organization. The Opening Keynote was with Clare Barclay, Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro.  There were discussions on building an agentic world where  personal agents, organisational agents, business process agents and cross organisation agents enable the use of AI in business to assist you with work. An example of this is Pages for AI artifacts that enables you to work with the organisation and AI . The 3 areas of innovations

  • Copilot
  • Copilot & AI Stack
  • Copilot devices

These innovative areas will increase value and reduce waste and Copilot Studio for autonomous agents was announced. 

A very important announcement, for us in the UK, is that Microsoft and UK Government have signed a five-year agreement to support the new era of digital transformation. So a very exciting time for the UK to grow.

There is gravity with data. AI needs to bring all the data together in one platform like Microsoft Fabric, to simplify data and have App servers, AI apps and tools. Microsoft showed its unified data offering in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to unify the data estate, at what ever stage a business is at, for databases and analytics. 



Trust is the most important thing in #AI. You must have a set of principles considering Security, Privacy, Safety at the core



AI is redefining Britain. It can take longer to realise value as change and adoption management takes time. It is cheaper to innovate than before so we need to think big, think bold and be ambitious 

Satya finished with 4 important points to note: expand opportunity, earn trust, protect fundamental rights and advance sustainability.

The announcement today can be read here

Autonomous agent capabilities across Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365 to help scale the impact of every individual, team, and business function

Monday 30 September 2024

What's new for Data Toboggan

There are plenty of things coming from Data Toboggan.

Videos from the last conference are being published on YouTube 

Alpine Coaster call for speakers is open https://sessionize.com/data-toboggan-alpine-coaster-2024/

The Winter conference date to add to your diaries: 25 January 2025.



Wednesday 25 September 2024

European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference Keynote

The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference is taking place this week in Stockholm, Sweden. There are 3300 attendees which is amazing.  The Keynote was entitled Microsoft Fabric Vision & Roadmap – Analytics in the Era of AI.  The keynote speakers; Arun Ulag, Kim Manis, Amir Netz, Marco Casalaina, Wangui McKelvey and Rudra Mitra from Microsoft.

The announcements blog contains a vast number of innovative enhancements and capability updates. The blog is: European Fabric Community Conference 2024: Building an AI-powered data platform

Fabric is about providing a unified data platform for AI transformation with these 3 areas

  • AI-powered development: Fabric can give teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment.
  • An AI-powered data estate: Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single, open data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and use that data to power AI innovation 
  • AI-powered insights: Fabric can empower everyone to better understand their data with AI-powered visuals and Q&A experiences embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 

Microsoft Fabric is shown in the AI Copilot stack.

There is a new exam available to enhance skilling in data engineering DP-700 This Certification measures Fabric data engineer skills:

  • Implementing and managing an analytics solution
  • Ingesting and transforming data
  • Monitoring and optimizing an analytics solution

Bringing all the skills together for data engineering, data science, and data analytics. You can read more here

 There  are numerous technical announcements




You can see the list of GA features shipped for network security, data security and governance. There is an End-to-End Security Whitepaper to the read aka.ms/FabricSecurityWhitepaper 

The public preview of the new copy job item provides
  • Built-in support for copying data between workspaces
  • Streamline copying data into and across OneLake
  • Setup automatic incremental copy

To help with deployment, the public preview was announced of the Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric. This will help empower deployment, management, and governance. This Microsoft Fabric Infrastructure as Code (IaC) new Terraform Provider lets you use the same tools and processes already employed for Microsoft Azure and other cloud resources.

Access Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly from Fabric via the new Mirrored Azure Databricks Catalog feature, now in Public Preview https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-US/blog/databricks-unity-catalog-tables-available-in-microsoft-fabric/




All the in dept announcements are on the Fabric Blog

The unified data culture was mentioned between Fabric and Office connected through Power BI. 


There are lots more releases out there. This is such an exciting time in the Data and AI space. The exciting announcement is that the conference will be back next year. 


Microsoft Purview at the Fabric Conference

There are a  number of  Microsoft Purview sessions at the European Microsoft Fabric Conference this week in Sweden. 

Check out the schedule 



Good Morning European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

 Good Morning for day 2 of the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference