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 24 January 2019

SQLBits 2019 is fast approaching

SQLBits 2019 is fast approaching. This year it is in Manchester 27 Feb - 2 March 2019. There is an informative article about The Great Data Heist. My insights on what to expect of the conference are here

There are some interesting training sessions on the Wednesday and Thursday to attend. These are

Wednesday 27 February 2019
with Alexander Klein and Gabi Münster
with Itzik Ben-Gan
with Kalen Delaney
with Jason Horner
with Alberto Ferrari
with Mark Whitehorn and Kate Kilgour
with Kevin Kline, Richard Douglas, Andy Yun and Andy Mallon
Thursday 28 February 2019
with David Klee and Bob Pusateri
with Erik Darling
with Marco Russo
with Terry McCann and Simon Whiteley
with Theo van Kraay

I hope to see you there.

Friday 18 January 2019

Data Science Activities linked to Business

Managing Big Data, AI and Data Science all need new processes and methods to be efficient. I am always on the look out for new tools that help refine my thinking and usage.  William Schmarzo shared the Hypothesis Development Canvas as tool to connect data science to the organization. It is to be used to develop business hypothesis.


He also shared thinking like a data scientist process.























Monday 14 January 2019

The AI Journey

The AI Journey is a interesting blog post that discusses the pragmatic approach to AI and use, the pattern for AI and the journey. 

The patterns seen are for virtual agents, ambient intelligence, AI assisted professionals, knowledge mining and autonomous systems More details are discussed here.

The question of where to start is being asked in many circles and BI is still the foundation. Without good quality data there is no AI. The largest hurdle I think that needs to be overcome is data ingest quality.


Sunday 13 January 2019

Thursday 10 January 2019

Cloudera vision and strategy

Today the joint vision for the new Cloudera was shared. It was interesting to hear their strategy going forward. I was expecting to hear something revolutionary and new but seems very much the same as other companies at the moment.

Here is a summary of the points.

They will be the only provider to run across all cloud providers Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM and Oracle. Both companies had the same vision to make the impossible possible, to transform data into clear and actionable insights and be committed to open source to give flexibility to its customers.
Cloudera want to

  • Invest in real time streaming at the edge
  • Be enterprise grade
  • Cloud native
  • A data warehouse
  • Provide AI industrialization
  • To deliver the industries first enterprise data cloud

They are developing the next generation platform called the Cloudera Data Platform. It will consist of


100% open source
The best of HDP3 + CDH 6
Hybrid and multi-cloud
Unified, from the edge to AI
Supported through till at least January 2022
Provide predictable and flexible migration paths
To separate compute and storage using technologies like Kubernetes
Have a consistent security ecosystem




There are two application changes:

The Cloudera Data Science workbench will now work with HDP.












HDF to work with CDH

Cloudera talked about the industrialization of AI which requires strategy, people and organization, security,governance and compliance and technology for an enterprise grade AI operation.

Cloudera have launched a new machine learning powered platform by Kubernetes. It is in preview.


Tuesday 8 January 2019

GitHub announces free private repositories


GitHub has made two announcements to start the new year off.

  • Unlimited free private repositories for up to three collaborators per repository
  • GitHub Enterprise is the new unified product for Enterprise Cloud (formerly GitHub Business Cloud) and Enterprise Server (formerly GitHub Enterprise).

Friday 4 January 2019

From the Edge to AI

Hortonworks completed their merger with Cloudera to make them the second largest open source software company in the world. The company is now called Cloudera. The combined platform will enable enterprises to create greater value from data with:

  • The right data analytics, running on data anywhere
  • Strong enterprise-grade and enterprise-wide data security, governance and management
  • Flexibility to choose among multi and hybrid clouds

There is a virtual event on 10 January from the edge to AI to hear about their vision and direction.

Wednesday 2 January 2019

Microsoft Ignite | The Tour




















The Microsoft Ignite | The Tour is at ExCeL in London 26-27 February 2019.

This conference is travelling round world to enable us to learn new ways to code, optimise your cloud infrastructure, and modernise your organisation with deep technical training.