The Tree of Learning is now fully grown

As part of the last 50 years of life changing education the Tree of Learning is now fully grown and installed in the Betty Boothroyd Library on Walton Hall Campus in Milton Keynes. It reflects on the last 50 years of life-changing education. As an alumni I supported this great cause to help provide potential students the opportunity to access higher education by supporting the 50th Anniversary Scholarships Fund. The Fund aims to offer free University education to 50 carers. Each donor could choose to be recognized and have a shield personalized with their name and a year that is significant to their OU journey.  Over 7200 people donated and choose to have a shield like myself. The Tree is 22-foot (6.7m). The Tree is organised with the earliest dates, the 1970s at the bottom moving through the decades to the most recent years at the top of the Tree. 

The Fourth Industrial Revolution Report 2019

The fourth industrial revolution report 2019 is independent research, commissioned by Big Data LDN and sponsored by Cloudera, surveyed 500 of the UK’s most influential data leaders.

Key Fourth Industrial Revolution Report 2019 findings include:

1. The human barriers to data-driven culture - The majority (86%) of UK data experts feel a lack of enthusiasm and support prevents creating a data-driven culture.
2. Lack of data visualisation holds UK organisations back - 45% of UK data leaders see the lack of data visualisation skills as the biggest barrier to business requirements.
3. Data leaders investing in humans to cross the skills chasm - Over half of UK organisations bridge the business (59%) and technology (57%) skills gap by upskilling employees.
4. AI and ML slow down - Despite AI and ML being considered as the technology of the moment, this year’s respondents have cited a 21% decrease in its usage.
5. GDPR still top concern - GDPR is still the dominating regulation for many (46%) UK data experts - its power over UK organisations’ data governance programs grows stronger each year. 

Download the report here

Big Data LDN 2019

Register for free for The UK's largest data & analytics conference and exhibition https://bigdataldn.com/register

Plan your two days at Big Data LDN. Create your own personalised itinerary, search speaker & exhibitor profiles and network with other delegates. https://guidebook.com/g/bigdataldn19/

Book of News Ignite 2019

This is the second edition of the Microsoft Ignite Book of News. It is a guide to all the announcements that Microsoft are making.  The book makes its easy to navigate through all the latest information and the vast number of exciting new products and features.

Microsoft MVP Wall 2019

Incredibly honored to have my name listed on the MVP wall at Microsoft Ignite.

Kubernetes Learning Path v2.0

A guide for anyone interested in learning more about Kubernetes in just 50 days

Day 1 Microsoft Ignite 2019

Microsoft Ignite day 1 shared many exciting announcements. three of them are

SQL Server 2019 is now generally available.

SQL Server 2019 brings enhancements in the core SQL engine, offers a scale-up and scale-out system with built in support for Big Data (Apache Spark, Data Lake), state of the art data virtualization technology, and with built-in machine learning capabilities.
Get the free e-book on SQL Server 2019.

Simply unmatched, truly limitless:  Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives the freedom to query data , using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate business intelligence and machine learning needs.

Azure services run anywhere with new hybrid capabilities: Azure Arc

Azure Arc is a set of technologies that unlocks new hybrid scenarios for customers by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure. Azure Arc is available in preview.

HDFS tiering in SQL Server Big Data Clusters

SQL Server Big data clusters has its own local HDFS built-in data lake to enable the storing of unstructured data and high volume data.  This data virtualization capability has a feature called HDFS tiering. It is a major new contribution to the Apache Hadoop project. 

With HDFS tiering you can access other data lakes by mounting the remote HDFS/S3 compatible data source to your local HDFS data lake. Access is seamlessly available from SQL Server or Apache Spark. Currently you can mount the following storage: Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, AWS S3, Isilon, StorageGRID and Flashblase.