A Postcard from Data Toboggan

Continuing our travels with Data Toboggan

History of Events

2021

Inaugural event Winter Edition 2021: January 30, 2021

Cool Runnings July 2021: June 12, 2021

World Synapse Day 2021: Friday, November 12th, 2021

2022

Winter Edition 2022: January 29, 2022

Cool Runnings July 2022: July 9, 2022

Alpine Coaster 2022: Friday, November 25th, 2022

2023

Winter Edition 2023: January 28, 2023

Cool Runnings June 2023: June 24, 2023

Alpine Coaster 2023: Friday, November 24th, 2023

2024

Winter Edition 2024: February 3, 2024

Data Toboggan Slide Preparation  @ SQLBits: Thursday 21 March 2024

Cool Runnings 2024: Saturday, July 13th, 2024.

Alpine Coaster 2024: Friday, November 8th, 2024

2025

Winter Edition 2025: Saturday, January 25th, 2025.

Register for our next event: https://bit.ly/DT2025-Register

Agenda: https://bit.ly/DT2025-Agenda

#microsoftfabric #synapseanalytics

Data Toboggan Winter Edition 2024

We are pleased to announce that Data Toboggan will return for its 4th year on Saturday 3rd February 2024. Our 2 track virtual conference covering covering all aspects of Azure Synapse Analytics and Fabric including Dedicated SQL Pools, Serverless SQL Pools, Spark, Pipelines, Data Engineering, Power BI, Machine Learning, and much more!

Imaged created in https://designer.microsoft.com/

Data Toboggan Alpine Coaster 2023 Agenda

Announcing the Data Toboggan - Alpine Coaster Agenda for APAC, EMEA and AMER

Sign up for Data Toboggan Alpine Coaster

Event: Friday 24th November

Register: https://bit.ly/DTAC23-Register

Agenda: https://www.datatoboggan.co.uk/alpine-coaster-2023-agenda/

Data Toboggan Cool Runnings 2023

The Piste maps for the Data Toboggan agenda have become a regular feature of our event. There is one for each room. They enable you to dream , learn and have fun. 

Event Date: Sat 24 June 2023

Register now: https://bit.ly/DTCR2023

Agenda: https://bit.ly/DTCR2023Agenda

Microsoft Build 2023 - the era of AI

The keynote shared some amazing technological advances that will change how analytics will work in the future. For me, the biggest change that had to happen, with the ever growing data volumes is the move to one copy of the data. Moving an ever growing volume of data at some point would become impossible, so really excited with todays announcements.

Satya Nadella talked on 5 of the 50+ announcements

• Bringing Bing to ChatGPT
• Copilot extensibility and plugins (to augment AI systems to access APIs, retrieve useful information, perform new computations and safely act on the user’s behalf)
• Azure AI Studio
• Azure AI Safety (Testing, Provenance, Deployment)
• Microsoft Fabric

 Microsoft Fabric, unifying for the era of AI

 

Microsoft Fabric - data analytics for the era of AI

This has four main elements

• Complete Analytics Platform (everything, unified, SaaS, Secured and governed)
• Lake Centric and Open (OneLake, One Copy, Open at every tier)
• Empower Every Business User (Familiar and intuitive, Built into Microsoft 365, Insight to action)
• AI Powered ( Copilot accelerated, GPT on your data, AI-driven insights)

It is one lake , one copy and one security model. This is a massive paradigm shift enabled by AI advancement and will enable competitive advantage. As we all know AI is only as good as your data. This is a SSAS product with frictionless onboarding, instance provisioning with centralized administration. That having tenant-wide governance, centralized security management with built in compliance. There are persona optimized experiences. It is built on open formats, no longer proprietary.

 

There is real separation of compute and storage with one copy for all computers with universal security.  The next level is having shortcuts to the relevant data to enable ease of access. 

The era of the Copilot is here. Reimagining software development with AI. This consideres user experience, application architecture and safety and security.

In summary

Microsoft Fabric Launch Event | May 24-25

Live digital event https://aka.ms/BuildWithAnalytics

Microsoft Build 2023 Book of News provides a roadmap to all the announcements

Introducing Microsoft Fabric: Data analytics for the era of AI

The Fabric Community  

Administration, Security and Governance in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric documentation

Introducing Microsoft Fabric

Data Toboggan 2023 Winter Edition

This is our third year of running Data Toboggan. We are incredibly grateful for all the speakers and attendees who have made this happen. We are pleased to share the agenda. 

Register: https://bit.ly/DT23Register

Agenda:  https://bit.ly/DT23Agenda

Date: Saturday 28th January 2023

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

Start the new year with speaking at Data Toboggan 2023. 

CFS is Open : https://sessionize.com/data-toboggan-2023

Event date: 28 January 2023 

Azure Synapse MVP series video

In the Azure Synapse Analytics month's MVP series video, Ryan Majidimehr was joined by two MVPs, myself and Andy Cutler, to talk about the upcoming Azure Synapse conference called Data Toboggan.  https://msft.it/6019eRKad

Data Toboggan - Alpine Coaster

We have a  mini conference to close the year out called Alpine Coaster on 25 November 2022.

How did Alpine Coaster get its Name

The longest toboggan run in Switzerland is the Pradaschier Rodelbahn. It has 31 curves and a difference in elevation of 480 m. The toboggan run coasts its way down to the valley with twists and turns. It is 3,060 m long. It is the most extensive alpine coaster run in Switzerland. It can move up to 40 kilometers/hour.

It takes between 7-10 minutes to ride Switzerland's longest toboggan run, the Pradaschier Rodelbahn.

Alpine Coaster Challenge

Create a Session between 7 – 10 minutes long, so bite-size sessions for hungry data professionals. This hopefully will leave everyone all excited for our full conference 28 January 2023.

Alpine Coaster Time Zones

Alpine Coaster will have 3 open sessions across 3 time zones (APAC, EMEA, AMER)

Each session lasting about 60-90 or so minutes each. This is a Friday event.

What type of Content is Expected

Share your tales of Azure Synapse Analytics in the real-world.  Deployments, proof-of-concepts, solved issues. 

This event will not be recorded. Use this to your advantage to be creative without pressure.

Register Now

Register for Alpine Coaster APAC Edition 7:30 AM GMT Friday 25 November 

https://www.meetup.com/data-toboggan/events/289129791/

Register for Alpine Coaster EMEA Edition 12:30 PM GMT Friday 25 November 

https://www.meetup.com/data-toboggan/events/289129800/

Register for Alpine Coaster AMER Edition 5:00 PM GMT Friday 25 November

https://www.meetup.com/data-toboggan/events/289129801/

Data Toboggan - Cool Runnings event summary

On Saturday 9th July 2022 the Data Toboggan - Cool Runnings event took place. This event was the 4th large conference since its inception in December 2020. Cool Runnings is the summer edition conference for Data Toboggan. The name was influenced by the film Cool Runnings about the Jamaican bobsleigh team. The phrase ‘Cool Runnings’ is defined in the film to mean ‘peace be the journey’.

There were so many amazing speakers from 16 countries worldwide with the Piste Maps becoming a speciality depicting the agenda. For the first time, Data Toboggan ran two parallel tracks to enable more content to be delivered. There was a wide variety of Azure Synapse Analytics sessions to watch in these categories:

• General Synapse and Data
• Dedicated SQL Pools
• Serverless SQL Pools and Lake databases
• Spark
• Data Explorer pools
• Integration
• Security
• Power BI
• Machine Learning and AI
• DevOps.

 

The keynote and endnote was delivered by Kim Manis, Partner Director of Product Management, Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI at Microsoft. I felt there was an amazing change in the middle of the day - from in-depth technical sessions - to a Knee-Deep in Tech Special Synapse Podcast.

To start your Azure Synapse learning subscribe, follow and like Data Toboggans YouTube Channel, Twitter and LinkedIn .  The majority of previous session recordings are available on YouTube and keep an eye out for the latest event videos.

Also now published Data Toboggan - Cool Runnings event (coeo.com)

Data Toboggan Cool Running 2022 Agenda

We are are really to announce our agenda for Data Toboggan Cool Runnings. Register now for 9 July.

Agenda: https://bit.ly/DTCR2022Agenda Register: https://bit.ly/DT-CR22Register

Reading UK Regional Spotlight event for Microsoft Build

Today, 25 May 2022, I was at the Microsoft Build regional spotlight event at Reading in the UK.

I had the amazing honour to speak at the event. I was a part of  two very different sessions. 

Where are all the cloud and data engineers? with Richard Conway and Dr Victoria Holt

Photo credit: Craig Porteous

The number of cloud and data engineers currently on the market are too few to satisfy the demand for the global digital transformation agenda. Where are they all? How do we entice new people into this exciting field and better prepare new graduate engineers to use cloud patterns and practices?

In the table topic we talked about the shortage of cloud and data engineers. The possible reasons for this and discussed actionable insights on how business and people can help increase the number engineers and how it is a continuous learning journey.  We answered questions poised by the in person and online attendees. The session was recorded and will be posted for on demand viewing here. 

Gain agility with an integrated data platform with Pragati Jain, Dr Victoria Holt, Richard Conway and Andy Cross

Photo credit: Andy Cutler

How you can accelerate innovation on your application with an integrated data platform that adapts to your needs with Hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities?

We started this ask the expert session discussing the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform that was announced yesterday and told a story of the apps from the core foundations of data governance, Microsoft Purview, moving through to Azure Synapse to digital twins and Power BI. We answered questions from the in person audience and online attendees on various topics.

The session was recorded and will be posted for on demand viewing here. 

It was a very rewarding day with plenty of opportunity for learning and making new friends. I would like to thank  the other speakers in my sessions for their amazing help,  the amazing tech team, producers, other MVPs , and the audience for selecting our sessions to attend.

Azure Synapse Influencer program

There is an exciting new program from Azure Synapse called influencers. 

The Azure Synapse Influencer program recognizes Azure Synapse Analytics community members who actively support one another by sharing Synapse-related content, announcements, and product news via social media.

The benefits of the new program

• Official recognition for your support of the Azure Synapse community
• An exclusive badge for each membership tier
• Azure Synapse Influencer spotlights and visibility through official Synapse channels
• Exclusive access to the Synapse engineering team, including events and Q&As
• Content collaboration opportunities with other Azure Synapse Influencers and the Synapse team

It is great to see 3 different tiers of membership.  This is great to add to the content that Data Toboggan helps bring to the community. 

Sign up here.

Follow @Azure_Synapse on Twitter . Share Azure Synapse-related posts and content using the hashtag #SynapseInfluencers and don't forget #datatoboggan for community content

Data Toboggan Conference links

During the course of the Data Toboggan 2022 winter conference day learning links were shared in the chat by various people. 

So for those wanting to learn more I have collated the links together. 

Best practices for serverless SQL pool - Azure Synapse Analytics

Recommendations and best practices for working with serverless SQL pool.

Pre recalculating datasets too 

Luke Moloney session is on GitHub

https://github.com/lmoloney/SynapseExternalTableCreator

Terraform in Azure Learn module available 

Some good MS resources around creating a Centre of Excellence using Power BI https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/guidance/center-of-excellence-establish

Machine Learning in Azure Synapse Analytics - Azure Synapse Analytics

Creating statistics on Serverless SQL Pools 

The whitepaper that Kevin Chant mentioned about a quick introduction to Azure DevOps  and his blog: https://www.KevinRChant.com and GitHub repo: https://github.com/kevchant

Azure Pipelines YAML schema reference

David Alzamendi provided a number of  Resources

Scripts: https://github.com/techtalkcorner/AzSynapseAnalytics/tree/master/Scripts/T-SQL

Data Skew: https://www.techtalkcorner.com/azure-synapse-analytics-data-skew/

Tables Design: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql/develop-tables-overview

Update statistics: https://www.techtalkcorner.com/update-statistics-azure-synapse-analytics-sql-pools/

Azure Synapse Analytics Service Levels :

Memory and concurrency limits for dedicated SQL pool in Azure Synapse Analytics

Columnstore Indexes: https://www.nikoport.com/

Maximize rowgroup quality for columnstore index performance

Query Store: Monitoring performance by using the Query Store

GitHub: https://github.com/techtalkcorner/AzSynapseAnalytics/tree/master/Scripts/T-SQL

Introduction to designing tables in Synapse SQL.

Design tables using Synapse SQL - Azure Synapse Analytics

Update Statistics in Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools -Tech Talk Corner

How to update statistics in Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools to improve the performance of your queries. Include two scripts.

Memory and concurrency limits - Azure Synapse Analytics

Distributed tables design guidance - Azure Synapse Analytics

Automatic aggregation in Power BI

Configuring dataflow storage to use Azure Data Lake Gen 2 - Power BI

Azure Synapse Analytics January Update 2022

The first blog of the year includes newly added database templates, a security whitepaper, and data integration updates. 

So plenty of post conference reading

Data Toboggan 2022 Winter Edition

The winter Data Toboggan run is over. It was fun. Thank you to all the amazing speakers and attendees who spent the day with us. Data Toboggan - Cool Runnings, our summer event, details to follow soon. See you next time. 

We will keep you posted on new content being shared to our YouTube channel. Please note we are just confirming with speakers about whether they are happy for their sessions to be shared.  Please subscribe to our channel. 

And lastly, it is February, and a data engineer's thoughts lightly turn to thoughts of 'Azure Synapse SQL Workload Monitoring with Ameena Lalani' Sign up to our first usergroup meetup of 2022 Thursday 10 February 18.00 GMT.

Data Toboggan this week

Data Toboggan is a cloud born conference with the aim to provide speciality training in Azure Synapse Analytics believing that enabling that slope to advanced analytics is paramount in the current world of data. As with snowfall it brings about the need to adapt rapidly to change. 

Some things to consider for the new year to kick start your learning plan.

Our third conference is this week. Please sign up, share and help make this the best conference yet for our amazing speakers giving their time to help us all grow and expand our knowledge.

Register: https://bit.ly/DT22Register

Agenda: https://bit.ly/DT2022Agenda 

We look forward to welcoming you to our event

 

Data Toboggan Piste Map

The Data Toboggan agenda is out. Take a journey with us down the slope that enables predictive analytics on 29 January.  We have lots of amazing speakers for a full 12 hours of free content specialising on Azure Synapse. We look forward to seeing you there.

Register: https://bit.ly/DT22Register

Agenda: https://bit.ly/DT2022Agenda

Event Synopsis for Azure World Synapse Day

We were really excited to have run a new type of event, Azure World Synapse Day. The event crossed 3 time zones APAC, EMEA and AMER.

The aim of the unconference was to have a lighter format that allowed people to share their personal stories, to share things about Azure Synapse technology, provide demos etc. Our interpretation of the unconference was 

Our session planning run list looked like

Followed by an intermission

Followed by an intermission

We had fun, we learnt a lot about running this type of event and wanted to thank our amazing speakers and attendees for sharing the event with us. 

We will be running the same type of event next year. We learnt a lot about this type of event. It will be coming further under the Data Toboggan brand as Data Toboggan - Alpine Coaster. So coasting through those shorter sessions.

Drive a data culture to power a new class of data first applications

The PASS Data Community summit session keynote contained a section presented by Arun Ulag, Corporate Vice President of the Intelligence Platform at Microsoft.

From data to intelligence for everyone and for every decision at any scale. He talked about data integration, analytics and business intelligence. The 3 messages were:

Empower every individual with AI capabilities such as the automatic report insights in Power BI with descriptive and diagnostic insights and insights on the move. 

Empower every team with Power BI and Teams, your data is where you chat. Power BI have goals that include being driven by data, built for teams, AI powered and automated action.

The third message was empower every organisation with a complete analytics fabric, Power BI + Synapse.

The public preview of Hybrid Tables automatic aggregations was announced.. 

Observation data is the fasted growing data segment with 175ZB of data expected by 2025 and 50 billion connected devices by 2030.

Also Azure Synapse Data Explorer was announced as now in public preview.

Data Toboggan extravaganza

There nothing so exciting as a surprise. Data Toboggan is trying something different. Take an international journey with us through 3 time zones: 

APAC - 08:00 - 09.00 GMT; 

EMEA - 12:00 - 13.20 GMT; 

AMER - 17:00 - 18.20 GMT

Bit size sessions to share how Azure Synapse Analytics inspired you, empowers you, and how it accelerates your business analytics. Register now: https://bit.ly/RegisterDTWSD21 

The Session Titles

The Abstracts

The Speakers

Jean Joseph, Dennes Torres, Anders Swanson, Rob Farley, Bob Duffy, Andy Cutler, Damien O'Connor, Sidney Cirqueira, Armando Lacerda, Gaston Cruz, Dustin Vannoy