Frogs on the march…Data in Devon 2019

A couple of our frogs recently had the opportunity to take part in Data in Devon, run by Jonathan and Annette Allen, or as those in the community know them, Father Jack and Mrs Father Jack, and William Durkin.

Alex Whittles and Reiss McSporran made their way down to Exeter for the opportunity to spread the word about Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Data Flows (Power BI and ADF!).

The 2-day conference had a number of presenters covering SQL Server, Azure, PowerShell, Python and many other data platforms.

Over the course of Fridays Training day, Alex led a workshop covering BI in Azure where the attendees gained an understanding of how to architect and implement a cloud hosted BI project and found out what services are available and how to use them including Power BI and Azure Data Lake.

Reiss was able to step in as our resident ADF guru and take the attendees through the finer arts of streamlining data processing and movement services into data production pipelines.

On the free to the public Saturday Alex gave a Machine Learning Primer talk and Reiss delivered a Lightning talk on ADF Journey: version 1 to version 2 to preview.

Both frogs then took part in the BI Power Hour, discussing ADF mapping data flows and a BI Q&A.

They even had the chance to speak about the latest development from the brains of Purple Frog – Power BI Sentinel – discussing the current functionality, how it fits into the Power BI world and also giving us the chance to formulate new ideas for the application.

After an insightful, exciting and productive couple of days of data knowledge and data sharing it was good to unwind with plenty of beer and curry but we will keep those data stats strictly undisclosed!

Photos courtesy of: @CPorteous @victoria_holt and @PurpleFrogAlex