Community

  • Why should you invest in your team and go to SQLBits?

    A week or two back the entire Purple Frog and Power BI Sentinel team traveled over to Wales to attend SQLBits, which if you didn’t know, is the world’s largest data platform event! This year we had the privilege to go SQLBits wearing two hats; delegate and sponsor – go big or go home, right? I thought I’d share some insights into what I, and the team, thought about spending a week at the ICC Wales with overwhelming amounts of training to…

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  • Speaking at Data Platform Summit

    I’m delighted to have been selected to speak at the Data Platform Summit (DPS), a virtual conference from 2nd to 4th December 2020, with Data, Analytics and Machine Learning content around the clock for a global audience. I’ll be presenting a session on “Machine Learning in Power BI”, exploring various methods of accessing Machine Learning functionality within the Power BI world, including text analytics, prediction…

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  • Business Intelligence in Azure – SQLBits 2018 Precon

    What can you expect from my SQLBits pre conference training day in February 2018 at the London Olympia? Well my friends, in short, we are going to take whirlwind tour of the entire business intelligence stack of services in Azure. No stone will be left unturned. No service will be left without scalability. We’ll cover them all and we certainly aren’t going to check with the Azure bill payer before turning up the compute on our data…

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  • Azure Data Lake – The Services. The U-SQL. The C# (Reference Guide)

    This post is a reference guide to support an event talk or webinar. The content is intended to assist the audience only. Thank you. Abstract How do we implement Azure Data Lake? How does a lake fit into our data platform architecture? Is Data Lake going to run in isolation or be part of a larger pipeline? How do we use and work with USQL? Does size matter?! The answers to all these questions and more in this session as we immerse ourselves in…

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  • Community Speaking Analysis with Power BI

    Just a short post. During the SQL Saturday Cambridge speaker meal on Saturday night I was chatting with various people at the dinner table. During this time I got asked the question by an event sponsor “do you speak at many of these things?”. While the general answer I gave at the time was yes. It occurred to me that I didn’t have any accurate means of answering the question with some richer detail. Being a data/business…

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  • Azure Business Intelligence – The Icon Game!

    As Azure becomes the new normal for many organisations our architecture diagrams become ever more complicated. Articulating our designs/data flows to management or technical audiences therefore requires a new group of cloud service icons in our pretty pictures. Especially for hybrid solutions. Sadly those icons aren’t yet that familiar for most. So, here’s a very simple blog post to help you recognise what’s in the Azure stack from a…

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  • My Advice for Speaking in the Community

    I wanted to do something a little different with this blog post. I’ve certainly not ran out of technical content to blog about. But I wanted to write something to help all those new speakers out there that are about to stand up at the front of an event and share there knowledge, maybe for the first time, or maybe a veteran speaker that wants to see if they agree with my advice. The former is basically where I found myself about 18 months…

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  • Cognitive Services with U-SQL (Reference Guide)

    This post is a reference guide to support an event talk or webinar. The content is intended to assist the audience only. Thank you. Abstract Microsoft’s Cognitive Services are basically the best thing since sliced bread, especially for anybody working with data. Artificial intelligence just got packaged and made available for the masses to download. In this short talk, I’ll take you on a whirl wind tour of how to use these massively…

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  • Wearing Four Hats at SQLBits 2017

    I know there are lots of great blog posts already out there from great people sharing their experiences from SQLBits. However, I hope none of them can offer an account quite as unique as mine from this years event. Why? Well, most people go to SQLBits as attendee’s to learn, network and socialise. This certainly applies to me. But ‘attendee’ was just 1 of my 4 hats (roles) at SQLBits 2017. In this post I’d like to…

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  • SQL in Seattle – My PASS Summit 2016

    This year was my first time at the PASS summit in Seattle. I’d of course been to plenty of other community events and conferences, but this was the big one! Spanning 3x days with 15x tracks to choose from in 4x rounds of sessions per day. Excluding precons. Really words don’t do the event or the venue justice. It’s massive. You basically need to see it for yourself. Which leads to the question, why write a blog post about it?…

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