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



Monday, 25 May 2020

The Future of Tech

I enjoyed watching this The Future of Tech session, with Kevin Scott and guests at Microsoft Build. The session discusses advances in large scale models for natural language generation and AI on the intelligent edge among other things. Watch it here


Saturday, 23 May 2020

Build Book of News 2020

What an amazing inspiring conference, where it is possible to make dreams become reality. The world is changing, reimagine tomorrow.

The Book of News 2020 shares some amazing advances to help shape the world to come.

The Microsoft Build 2020 Book of News is the guide to the key news items that were announced at Build.


Thursday, 21 May 2020

Sketch the docs

Great to see an interesting technique shared about visual storytelling. A summary about Sketchnoting and Zines is in the last 15 minutes. There were other sessions are Build

Video: https://aka.ms/msbuild2020-sketchnoting-video
Slides: https://aka.ms/msbuild-sketchnoting-slides
Site: http://sketchthedocs.dev
Blog: http://dev.to/nitya






















Wednesday, 20 May 2020

2020 Build Keynote

The Build Keynote from Satya Nadella was entitled empowering every developer,  on Tuesday 19 May. You can watch it here.

In this time of uncertainty, developers will play a central role in reimaging the world we live in and accelerating our path to recovery. The 3 phases he touched on emergency, recovery and reimaging. Going forward business will need to be able to remote everything at a moments notice, automate everywhere to be agile and simulate anything. The Power Platform, Azure Arc as the first control plane and Teams are enabling the future. Satya left us with a thought provoking statement.

"We are at an inflection point. As developers you have that opportunity, as well as a responsibility, to define what should be rebuilt, what should be reimaged, and what should be left behind." Satya Nadella

We are crossing into a new frontier, anywhere together.



A few of the many interesting announcements follow: 

Microsoft responsible machine learning capabilities build trust in AI systems, developers say
Build AI you can trust with responsible ML

Autoscale is now generally available on AzureCosmosDB, and the launch the public preview of their new serverless model in just a couple of months!


Microsoft Build brings announcements for cloud data, analytics services, and intersection of the two
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-build-brings-announcements-for-cloud-data-analytics-services-and-intersection-of-the-two/
Azure SQL Edge now in preview
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/azure-sql-edge-now-in-preview/

Microsoft announces a new supercomputer and lays out vision for future AI work.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/openai-azure-supercomputer/
It has built one of the top five publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world, making new infrastructure available in Azure to train extremely large artificial intelligence models.



Thursday, 14 May 2020

Microsoft Build is coming to your home

Sign up to watch Microsoft Build, a digital event, May 19-20 2020. Microsoft Build delivers a new way to create unique opportunities for us to explore the latest developer trends and tools in a series of detailed, expert-led key segments. This is always an amazing conference that empowers the developer.


Friday, 8 May 2020

Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2020 Excitement

Microsoft Business Applications Summit took place online this year 6-7 May 2020 for free. New features were shared and the sessions discussed how to optimize operational processes. I was particularly interested in Power BI. There was an emphasis on Data Culture for every decision. The new features are intelligent and familiar, meet the needs of business and IT, in a unified way, and are ubiquitous, for everyone to have access. Trust is the foundation with BI for collaborative teamwork and BI being woven into the fabric of the organization.






















There are some amazing AI features with the natural language smart narratives, being able to suggest questions in Q and A and there is trend analysis automatically generated over points.





















The data stack for Power BI collects query patterns and determines materialized views for optional performance. Microsoft Information Protection in Power BI is GA. For admin and governance you can bring you own log analytics. Deployment pipelines are coming as part of the application lifecycle management.

Lineage view and dataset impact analysis are two useful additions to the toolset.  Lineage view recently became generally available. Lineage view enables you to visualize the entire data journey from a given workspace, making it easy to determine the upstream and downstream dependencies of artifacts, examine artifact information, and take action. Dataset impact analysis enables a dataset owner to understand how a dataset is being used within the workspace and in other workspaces. With the dataset impact analysis, it is possible to determine if a dataset is being used in mulitple workspaces, so the impact of changes can be reduced.



There will be templates to help people start with Power BI like other Microsoft products. There were so many other new feature announced. You can watch the sessions from the day on-demand.


Saturday, 2 May 2020

Data Quality Framework

Data quality is defined as the planning, implementation, and control of activities that apply quality management techniques to data, in order to assure it is fit for consumption and meets the needs of data consumers. (The Data Management Body of Knowledge)

The trustworthiness and quality of our data has real impact in the world and on society influencing critical decisions. To help ensure the data we collect from around us helps answers questions and provide informed answers, a data quality framework is required. There are many components required to help improve data quality.  The Data Quality dimensions that can be measured to manage improvement are:

  • Accuracy
  • Completeness
  • Consistency
  • Integrity
  • Reasonability
  • Timeliness
  • Uniqueness
  • Validity
  • Accessibility

Below is my data quality framework.