SQLBits Buddies

Bits Buddies is a new idea being trialled at SQLBits Arcade. It is aimed at the social side of the event. We want attendees to really enjoy the event and not feel isolated with no one to talk to or to share the event with. We would love you to attend the event again next year and leave the event having made new connections in the sqlfamily. We want to help you become a part of our amazing community. 

Before the event, we are having a drop in chat office hours sessions with some of the SQLBits Buddies to answer questions and so you can meet a friendly face. For more details  #sqlbits2022

SQLBits and the case for data governance

SQLBits is fast approaching and in 3 weeks time we have the opportunity to meet the data community in person again. It will be nice to catch up, but also it will be different than before with the conference being partially virtual. It is great to see the opportunity to attend virtually as well as in person. As well as the Covid issue, this makes the event more inclusive.

Data governance is one of the things I am keen to help drive forward because understanding your data better means increased business value and enables innovation. Data governance however is a word that the industry says should not be named. It has connotations of expense and little value for businesses. It is in my mind data erudition, that learning, showing great knowledge about the data and having good quality data. Then using agile techniques to tackle small chunks and iterate through the highest priority business cases  first. It is not about trying to bring all the historic data into a managed state and drilling into full data dictionaries.

With that in mind I am excited about my session with Erwin and Wolfgang with Richard moderating where we will answer questions about Data Governance with Azure Purview. There are two ways to tackle the problem of data governance, through understanding the business problem and through using a tool to help solve part of the problem technologically. Experts in the industry have differing opinions on which to start with first.

Ask your questions for our session via this form https://forms.office.com/r/dTP38LnmsJ

We look forward to seeing you on Friday 11 March from 14:10-15:00. You will find us in room 04.

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

Data Governance with Azure Purview

SQLBits 8-12 March 2022 is approaching soon. I am really excited to be a part of a session with Erwin de Kreuk and Wolfgang Strasser. The session: Data Governance with Azure Purview - Ask the Experts

To submit your questions in advance for the session we have a Microsoft form to complete.

Data Toboggan - our year 2021

We have had a very busy first year and enjoyed it all. Thank you to all who made our conferences possible, organisers, speakers, attendees, our logo designer and to those who helped share our event.

We are back 29 January 2022. 

Call for Speakers https://bit.ly/DT22CFS 

Register https://bit.ly/DT22Register

Data Toboggan Azure World Synapse Day: Speakers

Data Toboggan have an amazing line up of speakers. We would love you to join us and support our amazing speakers who have given up their time to speak. 

Register now https://bit.ly/RegisterDTWSD21 

Speakers

Lakehouse in a nutshell: Serverless SQL pool + Aggs + PowerBI - Armando Lacerda

DW Automation for EDW in Synapse  - Demo Only - Bob Duffy

Manage Packages on Synapse Spark - Dustin Vannoy

Migrating a Data Warehouse to Synapse Analytics - Andy Cutler

Patterns with Synapse Notebooks - Damien O'Connor

From Housekeeping to Data Engineer - My journey to find my passion -Jean Joseph

Secrets of SQL Dedicated Pool - Dennes Torres

Spreading the word about Azure Synapse Analytics - Sidney Cirqueira

Synapse and Power BI - Intro to a great data mix - Gaston Cruz

dbt & Synapse: have you seen SQL do this before? - Anders Swanson

Distributed Data in Dedicated SQL Pool - Rob Farley

Let innovation drive world Azure Synapse Day 2021

Want some more information and background about our November Conference on 12 November 2021. One of our organisers has written a great post explaining it here.

You can read it here as well

So, while there’s been all this stuff going on, a couple of data friends and I started a conference series and a user group both focused on Azure Synapse Analytics. Because, you know.. you can never have too many online conferences, training sessions, and presentations, right ?

We’ve probably all attended online lerns recently, been to meetings online, chatted with friends and family over new and sometimes unfamiliar apps like Teams and Zoom (yes, the nerds have been using them for a while, but collab apps just went *wild* recently).

But we (as in me and the aforementioned data friends) wanted to do something different. Something more…. interactive. More…. conversational. Less “I’ll sign up and download the recordings later, maybe“. And so, somewhat concietedly, we came up with ‘World Azure Synapse Day 2021’, where we can share, chat, learn, and laugh (maybe) to round out the year. A sort of retrospective on the future, if you like.

Full disclosure: we didn’t come up with the format ourselves. A few months back, a company called DataStax did something similar for the worldwide Apache Cassandra community where they had short talks from the engineering team, the sales people, their marketing. We’re aiming for something waaaayyyy less corporate, and more about you  We just borrowed the good bits and left out the sales pitch.

So we’re doing three sessions on the day, timed to hopefully coincide with people’s availability in each of APAC, EMEA, and AMER time-zones. We hope it will feel a bit more like a meeting than a presentation, as there’ll be several short talks and interviews in each. The sessions will *not* be recorded (sorry, you’re going to have to be there to see it !) – it’s really important to us that each session flows and everyone can participate, and recording that doesn’t seem fair. We’re also not even publishing an agenda, just a schedule of who will be talking at each session – we want the speakers to speak for themselves in every way possible – so there’s no pressure on anyone to ‘get it right first time’, and each and every contribution is welcome.

If you want to attend (and we hope you do), please sign up to the MeetUp for Data Toboggan here. There’s also a code of conduct under the heading ‘Be Excellent To Each Other’ that we’d ask you to adhere to, but that’s all you have to do. If you want to have your voice heard, just submit some thoughts through Sessionize, and we’ll be in contact. And don’t hesitate to ask any question you like in the MeetUp group – we’ll make sure you get a response 

Hope to see you at Data Toboggan – World Azure Synapse Day 2021 ! Until then, stay safe.

The Data Toboggan Team

Data Toboggan World Azure Synapse Day

We are back for another edition of Data Toboggan, but we'd like to do something a bit different this time round.

In the last year, Azure Synapse has celebrated its second birthday, and we've all been busy doing awesome stuff with the capabilities of the platform and loving every minute. 

We want *you* to tell us how Azure Synapse Analytics inspires you, empowers you, and how it accelerates your business analytics. Tell us your stories, and what you're hoping for in the coming 12 months of Azure Synapse...

So, this next edition of Data Toboggan won't be a full-day, tech-focussed event.

Instead, we're planning on doing three 1 to 2 hour community sessions where we listen to you tell your story in a more open format.

We're not looking for long sessions - ideally each speaker would get 10 to 15 minutes to share and discuss. We're targeting Friday 12th November as the delivery date, with 3 sessions running at locally convenient times for APAC, EMEA and AMER (times are GMT, because that's where we are, and we hope they translate to 'convenient').

APAC - 08:00 GMT

EMEA - 12:00 GMT

AMER - 17:00 GMT

Look out for submission links heading your way soon ! You can submit to talk at any of the sessions - whichever is most convenient for you.

Thanks for being with us this year. We hope you'll enjoy sticking around for a while.

Stay safe,

The Data Toboggan Team.