Ask the Expert - Group B (Sat: 16:00 to 16:50)

How to be awesome at getting your next job

Finding that job you desire and want can be hard work. First, writing that CV that gets your name on the interview list. Then, making the first good impression at the interview, handling those tough questions easily. These skills are something you can learn This session, is based on many years real life hard won experience. What will be shared is tips and techniques that have got me jobs I wanted. This session is full of practical advice that you to can take away and use in your life. I will share some of the tips and techniques I have used to get roles over our career. * Creating a CV that gets noticed. * How to work with recruitment agents. * What to say when you speak with recruitment agents. * Ways to get your name to the top of the recruiter's list. * How to prepare for an interview * Get some insider tips on how to deal with those difficult interview questions. * What to say and what not say at an interview. * First hand advice from someone who has been on both sides of the job interview. When you leave this session, you have techniques and tips you can use as soon as you leave the session to help you in your search for that role you want.

Power BI Incremental refresh made simple.

Power BI has many amazing features that will make life much easier and more efficient. Yes, incremental refresh is one of them, so you read the official Microsoft documentation. Maybe once, then again, just a few more times. Now you have more questions than answers. Or was that just how I felt? If you thought the same thing or want to ask questions, this session is for you. This session will look at setting up incremental refreshes for both Dataflows and Datasets. Explain what ALL the different settings mean and words we can all understand. How will I perform this daring feat? Using a combination of words, pictures and examples. As part of the presentation, I will share the demo code so you can try this at home. Leaving this session, you will understand how to configure Incremental Refresh and use it when you return to your office. You will have a link to the code shown as part of the session. So that you to can see how it works.

The art and skill of listening

We all want to be listened to. In our busy world sometimes we forget how to listen, often to other people. There are advantages to listening, and its a skill we can learn.

10 reasons to look at using Azure Data Studio

Yet another new tool from Microsoft ! Why should you consider using it? Thats a good question. In this session we will explore at least 10 reasons to use the tool, and maybe a few more.

Better ETL with Managed Airflow in ADF

Building complex data workflows using Azure Data Factory can get a little clunky, especially as you orchestration needs get more complex. Recently another option become available, Managed Airflow in ADF. Managed Airflow brings Apace Airflow to Azure as a PaaS service. In this session we discover what Airflow is, why we might want to use it for ETL orchestration, and see how it works with lots of demos.

Introduction to Databricks Delta Live Tables

Delta Live Tables is a new framework available in Databricks that aims to accelerate building data pipelines by providing out of the box scheduling, dependency resolution, data validation and logging. We'll cover the basics, and then get into the demo's to show how we can: - Setup a notebook to hold our code and queries - Ingest quickly and easily into bronze tables using Auto Loader - Create views and tables on top of the ingested data using SQL and/or python to build our silver and gold layers - Create a pipeline to run the notebook - See how we can run the pipeline as either a batch job, or as a continuous job for low latency updates - Use APPLY CHANGES INTO to upsert changed data into a live table - Apply data validation rules to our live table definition queries, and get detailed logging info on how many records caused problems on each execution. By the end of the session you should have a good view of whether this can help you build our your next data project faster, and make it more reliable.

Slowly Changing Dimensions made Easy with Durable Keys

In this session we look at a simple way to implement Kimball durable keys on a SCD2 dimension. This provides an easy, performant, way to support reporting on data using historical and current hierarchies.

SQL Server Encryption for the Layman

With GDPR and the number of data breaches we see in the news, encrypting sensitive data is incredibly important. In this talk we start with the basics of encryption, moving on to look at the ways we can encrypt data in SQL Server and Azure SQL DB.