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



Wednesday, 7 August 2024

Microsoft Fabric Known Issues

There is a Power BI report that contains the list of known feature issues for the various areas of Microsoft Fabric. The report can be found here.



Tuesday, 6 August 2024

The AI Hub in Microsoft Purview

The Microsoft Purview AI hub is a preview feature that helps you govern and gain insight to generative AI apps and helps protect through mitigating and managing risks. With the explosion of generative AI this has become a crucial addition in the governance world.

The AI Hub helps with

  • strengthening information protection for Copilot
  • supporting compliance management for Copilot
  • fortifying data security for AI
  • insights and analytics that enable that view on AI activity
  • policies to help protect and prevent data loss
  • compliance for optimal data handling

The use of Purview AI hub works well with other capabilities to improve data security.

  • Sensitivity labels and content encrypted by Microsoft Purview Information Protection
  • Data classification
  • Customer Key
  • Communication compliance
  • Auditing
  • Content search
  • eDiscovery
  • Retention and deletion
  • Customer Lockbox
The insights, policies and control secures data from Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and AI apps from third-party large language modules (LLMs).







Thursday, 1 August 2024

The changing new Microsoft Purview Portal

Microsoft unveiled the new Purview portal, a game-changer for organizations navigating the complex landscape of data security and risk management. This change is ongoing within Microsoft Purview with the relocation of portal features and retirement of some features. The new Microsoft Portal features changes


The portal's design facilitates easy navigation with the solution cards for quick access to the solutions within  Risk & Compliance, Data Governance, and Data Security sections.

The key features areas are now

Data Security: covers discovery and protecting sensitive information across your organization with a robust set of data security solutions, including Data Loss Prevention and Information Protection and adaptive protection .

Data Governance: It offers unified data governance solutions to manage services across your on-premises, multi cloud, and SaaS environments. This includes creating an up-to-date map of your data estate with classification, data catalog, data quality (preview), lineage, data management, and data estate insights.

Risk and Compliance: The platform includes solutions to help minimize compliance risks and meet regulatory requirements, ensuring your organization stays ahead of the curve in data protection standards with eDiscovery and audit, communication compliance, data lifecycle management, and records management.


Wednesday, 17 July 2024

The Growth of Microsoft Purview

It has been an interesting few years watching the growth of a data governance solution into a product that truly helps govern business data. The growth of  Purview has seen many changes over the last few years, to its current incarnation that becomes GA in September. The addition of in-product AI, the Responsible AI tooling, coming in the AI Hub, adds a new dimension, which will enable the next evolution for data governance.  The integration of Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview will help analytics solutions have better quality data out of the box.


hashtagMicrosoftPurview


Microsoft Purview Data Governance generally available

The reimagined Microsoft Purview Data Governance will be generally available 1 September 2024. This is really exciting new as the reimagine portal has so much amazing capability to help business data be better, more secure and help drive business growth.

The convergence of cyberattacks, increasing regulations, an ever-expanding data estate, and business demand for insights  pressurizes business leaders to adopt a unified strategy to confidently ensure AI readiness. We see that unification of data security and governance capabilities to create a modern data governance solution that is easy for businesses to adopt democratising data and addresses the challenges of AI.

The most important feature to understand is that Data Governance require the business , people, processes as well as a technological tool to automate data understanding. It is built into Microsoft Fabric with the capability of creating custom reports from Fabric data with the data quality feature supporting any Fabric source.

As I shared before these are the collection of tools.



Sunday, 14 July 2024

That's a Wrap Data Toboggan Cool Runnings 2024

Data Toboggan Cool Runnings 2024 ran 13 July 2024. We ran our largest event error since inception in 2020. We were so pleased to be able to have 3 full tracks of sessions from speakers all round the world. The event ran for 12 hours, starting with presenters from Australia, through India, Europe, Scandinavia, UK and finishing in the USA. It was our largest event with over 400 attendees. It is our principle to never close registration until after event finishes, so the event is open.to register and join all day. It is the people who make the event, the speakers, the attendees, and helpers. The organising team had loads of fun putting the event together.

We hold 3 events a year.

  • Data Toboggan - Winter Edition (full conference | end of Jan)
  • Data Toboggan - Cool Runnings (full conference | beginning July)
  • Data Toboggan - Alpine Coaster  (unconference real world short talks | early November)

We also have a user group that meets from time to time when there are interesting areas to cover called Data Toboggan - Slide Preparation. 

The virtual event started covering Azure Synapse Analytics when it was launched and with the introduction of Microsoft Fabric we have grown with technology innovation and now cover Microsoft Fabric, Synapse, Data Engineering, Data warehousing, and Analysis. We have a track with Microsoft Purview and AI connected elements as well. 

We look forward to seeing you all at the next event.



Thursday, 11 July 2024

Seven time Microsoft MVP

I am pleased to share that I was renewed as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP yesterday. 

I am overjoyed and humbled to be a part of this amazing program for another year, my 7th year. It is such a privilege to be able to share knowledge and help others in the community grow. I am always excited about the amazing technology we have at our finger tips, such as Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview. I am looking forward to another year contributing to and growing, the amazing data community.  Thank you Microsoft.

Award Category

Data Platform

Technology Area

Microsoft Purview, Azure Synapse Analytics