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

BI in the cloud on the menu – Select your dish of the day

with Alexander Klein and Gabi Münster

Performance-centric T-SQL

with Itzik Ben-Gan

Building a Modern Database Architecture with Azure

with Jes Borland

Show it Right! An In-Depth Guide to Visualization

with Jonathan Stewart

Practical SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting & Tuning

with Amit Bansal

Faster Queries Without NOLOCK!

with Kalen Delaney

Azure Data Factory Deep Dive

with Jason Horner

From 0 to DAX

with Alberto Ferrari

Machine Learning – how to be a superstar

with Mark Whitehorn and Kate Kilgour

Stop Tuning Queries and Start Tuning Your Workload

with Erin Stellato

An absolute beginners guide to power BI

with Michael Johnson

Modernize your database with SQL Server 2019

with Bob Ward

SentryOne Real World Performance Bootcamp

with Kevin Kline, Richard Douglas, Andy Yun and Andy Mallon

Thursday 28 February 2019

Professional and Proficient PowerShell: From Writing Scripts

with Rob Sewell

Level Up Your Data Platform Cloud Infrastructure

with David Klee and Bob Pusateri

21 Essential Scripts: Performance Tuning for EVERYONE

with Pinal Dave

Loading And Transforming Data In Power BI

with Chris Webb

Modern SQL Server Availability Architectures

with Allan Hirt

SQL Server Tools for Query Performance Tuning

with Grant Fritchey

Total Server Performance Tuning

with Erik Darling

Advanced DAX

with Marco Russo

Optimising ETL on Microsoft Data Platform (SQL & Azure)

with Niko Neugebauer

Azure Databricks: Engineering Vs Data Science

with Terry McCann and Simon Whiteley

Microsoft SQL Server Big Data Clusters Architecture

with Buck Woody

Deep Dive into Azure Data Factory with SSIS

with Sandy Winarko

Data Science from scratch with Azure Machine Learning

with Nishant Thacker

SELECT * FROM Azure Cosmos DB

with Theo van Kraay

I hope to see you there.

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.

Machine Learning Canvas

I came across this useful machine learning canvas and thought it worth sharing.

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.

Business Intelligence and Data Science Difference Reading

Data Science Central have shared an updated article from Bill Schmarzo, the Difference Between Business Intelligence and Data Science and Kirk Borne shared this useful summary diagram.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Happy New Year 2019