Christmas 2020 Data pictures: Data Ethics

A picture tells a 1000 words. Just a bit of fun collating some key points about data ethics. The only problem is there is so much to include that one picture does include so much. 

Data Toboggan

I would like to run a virtual conference at the end of January beginning of February called Data Toboggan. The slope that enables predictive analytics. 

I would like these session types 

• 4 ice sessions that may be short sessions for new speakers \ diversity enabled
• snow transformative innovation sessions
• toboggan regular session 

I think what it needs is 

• a logo
• website
• sessionize for call for submissions 
• the sessionize schedules published to the website to show local times zones and agenda
• meetup for attendees booking
• MSTeams for the conference sessions

I was hoping a few people would be interested and willing to help join together to bring this event to life. 

Shape Your Future with Azure Data and Analytics

The Shape Your Future with Azure Data and Analytics digital event on 3rd December 2002 shared how a unified, end-to-end platform for data and analytics builds business agility and resilience. There is an imperative for digital transformation to take place. The speed of that transformation will define an organisations future. It is that tech intensity that Satya Nadella keeps mentioning.

The ability to empower people intelligently, virtually optimise operations and transform products is the future he sees. It is this analytical power that will turn an organisation from being reactive into being proactive. This predictive power will transform organizations. Data is your most strategic asset and it should be listed as its own line as a business asset.

It was announced that Azure Synaspe became generally available.

A tool that I wasn't aware of was Azure Synapse link. Azure Synapse Link enables no complex Extract Transform and Load of data to get to the analytics.

Digital transformation is never done. It is lots of little races to improve things. Once the data foundation is built there is freedom which enables flexibility to reimage the process then automate it. Data is going to define the century in the environment and health care resilience. The ability to test hypothesis's in parallel and experiment every day transforms the efficiency and effectiveness of the world.

The many speakers talked about the core capabilities of Analytics and AI and Data Governance. Microsoft announced Azure Purview, a unified data governance platform. It will change the way businesses grow and enable predictive power. Data governance is key to gaining control over the data. Reimagine data governance as the heart of every successful data project.  Data governance reimagined with a business glossary, a trusted data dictionary and no more building manual ontologies with automated classification. As well as a linage function you can look downstream to see where all the data is being used. It see this as being amazingly helpful in supporting business. It is a data map across your data estate that will register, scan and auto classify data. A business glossary helps drive meaning. Azure Purview changes the game in governance and was a missing piece. 

Christmas 2020 Data pictures: Data Value

 A picture tells a 1000 words. Just a bit of fun collating some key points about the value of data.

Christmas 2020 Data pictures: Data Catalogue

 A picture tells a 1000 words. Just a bit of fun collating some key points about Data Catalogues.

PASS Summit Day 2 SQL Server Evolution

 The day two keynote was delivered by Hanuma Kodavalla a Microsoft Technical Fellow. 

He started with an interesting quote from 'Adventures of a Mathematician' by Stanislaw Ulam

"It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs."

Then sharing the papers that started it all and the fact that is the 50th anniversary of Codd's paper this year.  

I was interested to learn that the Microsoft Database Research Group is an extension of the SQL product group. 

He mentioned this paper I read a long time ago “One size fits all": an idea whose time has come and gone  M. Stonebraker; U. Cetinteme (2005).  The last 25 years of commercial DBMS development can be summed up in a single phrase: "one size fits all". This phrase refers to the fact that the traditional DBMS architecture (originally designed and optimized for business data processing) has been used to support many data-centric applications with widely varying characteristics and requirements. In this paper, we argue that this concept is no longer applicable to the database market, and that the commercial world will fracture into a collection of independent database engines, some of which may be unified by a common front-end parser.

He went through all the previous versions of SQL with their key features ending with SQL Server 2019.

Another key paper was mentioned

Then moved to discuss newer product features of SQL Azure Serverless and Azure Defender

 

SQL Server secure developments include alway encrypted and secure enclaves.

Then he mentioned the new ledger enabled tables that will be coming soon.

This was a session through history leading to strive forwards to realize Codd's and Gray's vision. It will be exciting to see what comes next. A great session for an industry person who is a database researcher.

PASS Virtual Summit 2020 Keynote Day 1

The summit, 10-13 November 2020 is being live streamed through PASSTV.

This year’s first keynote is entitled 'Bringing the future into focus, the end to end Azure Data platform'.

Digital transformation brings change. This change of new technologies can be challenging to learn. For businesses the economies of scale can create efficiencies. The data platform has many elements BI, Analytics and AI, Hybrid Data management, relational databases, Edge and IOT, NoSQL databases, Azure Open Source Database Services (OSS databases) etc. New technologies can help save time. It is good news that the DBA’s key skills are transferable.

Azure services consist of SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines (for lift and shift and OS level access), Azure SQL Managed Instances (for modernizing existing apps), Azure SQL Database (for build cloud apps). There is also  hyperscale for specific use cases. SQL Server workloads run best on Azure and have patching regimes.

It is good to see that Azure helps customers move at their own pace to the cloud which will enable them to pivot their company with less risk to something new. Azure SQL Server serverless means  pay only for what is required. Azure Edge is an interesting development and is now generally available.

 

With the complex network of applications and systems in the modern data landscape it can be difficult to connect the data to gain value. Data virtualization is an important change.

Azure Arc

Azure Arc is, I think, a real game changer to help with diverse database locations. It is a set of technologies that extends azure management and native data services outside of azure infrastructure to run across your environment even if you can’t migrate to the cloud due to data sovereignty, latency and or regulatory requirements you can still get the efficiency and agility the cloud offers with Azure Arc.

It is a versionless evergreen SQL that ensures you are always current. It provides cloud elasticity on premises which allows optimization of performance of your workloads and dynamically scale up and down without application downtime.   Azure Arc offers unified management which allows you to see your data services running on premises alongside these running on azure through a single pane of glass and manage them using familiar tools like azure portal, azure data studio and azure CLI.

Azure Arc enabled SQL Server Managed Instance and PostgreSQL Hyperscale are in Public Preview

It is possible to use features such as vulnerability assessment and advance threat protection with SQL Defender using the same rules and machine learning algorithms.

The public preview was announced for

•          Azure Cosmos DB – Serverless for all APIs
•          Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
•          Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server
•          Azure Cache for Redis – Enterprise

Cloud Scale analytics on Azure with Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Databricks

 

Announcing public preview of new guided UI for machine learning models. Then to complete the services, Azure Synapse to analyse the data and then report  on it in Power BI completes the stack.