Craig Porteous

I'm a lifelong learner with a passion for creative problem-solving. I share my expertise and insights with the data community through talks, video content, and bringing people together with the DATA:Scotland event.

Proposed Sessions for 2026

Centralise or Federate - How to Scale your Lakehouse

In this session, I’ll explore the trade-offs between centralised and federated Data Lakehouse architectures, how to decide what fits your organisation, and why the best solutions often blend both approaches. You’ll learn how governance, data ownership, training, and tooling choices can make or break your strategy. Attendees will walk away with an understanding of the benefits of federation, and a practical roadmap for balancing autonomy with standardisation in a real-world Data Lakehouse.

Do You Really Need a Data Lakehouse? Separating Hype from Business Need

Join this session to unpack what a Lakehouse is, the benefits it actually delivers, the problems it’s designed to solve, and the warning signs that your current warehouse may be holding you back. I’ll discuss practical decision criteria to help you determine whether a Lakehouse approach fits your goals or if your data platform is already doing everything you need.

Previous Sessions

Zero to Lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric

Fabric is Microsoft's unified software as a service data platform, built around a Data Lakehouse architecture. In this session I'll share an array of data Lakehouse architecture patterns, and demonstrate how you can build a full Data Lakehouse platform without ever touching an Azure resource.

Building a Lakehouse on the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

This session session aims to give you that context. We'll look at how spark-based engines work and how we can use them within Synapse Analytics. We'll dig into Delta, the underlying file format that enables the Lakehouse, and take a tour of how the Synapse compute engines interact with it. Finally, we'll draw out our whole Lakehouse architecture

Designing Data Architectures that InfoSec will actually approve

In this session I'll guide you from through a secure reference architecture with Data Factory, Databricks, Data Lake, and Azure Synapse, working together as a secure, fully productionised platform. Each has their own idiosyncrasies, but this session will teach you the options available and the pitfalls to avoid.

Why the Lakehouse?

In this session I'll cover what the Data Lakehouse architecture is, where it fits against existing architectures like a data warehouse, and why you should build one. We'll also cover the underlying technology options to arm you with all of the information you need to plan your next data platform.

Keynote by The Community

Ben and Rob have found some wonderful folk to actually do the important parts of the community keynote. on the theme of How to be a nonpassive member of the data community