DataWeekender 6.5 and Sessions for RaboEngineering, UG-Groningen and Southampton

By Rob Litjens

In a recent post on Linked In I announced that I have a bit a busy week. In this post I will sum up what I have done and how it worked out.

DataWeekender 6.5

DataWeekender has a special place. I am volunteering there for a quite a few times. It is always a pleasure to work with the team.

Somehow this year was more special for me. I was helping other speakers, but also have a session. The session I did was on #DataAPIBuilder.

For me it was the first presentation after a few months growing in the product. That meant that I have been working and blogging on the product, but that did not lead into an update on the sheets and code. That is why I had updated the sheets. Becaus time got limited a bit and I needed to fix parts of the story and code, not all went smoothly. During the session I needed to search some scripts which is not quite helpfull.

I was quite happy with my performance, I know I can improve and that was the work I performed during the weekend. I started moving scripts to Juptyr notebooks.

Thank you Damir Matesic, Gethyn Ellis, Justin Bird, Kevin Chant and Pragatie Jain for having me!

RaboEngineering week

Rabo Engineers Week is an company internal event mainly organised by Chris Stapper, Britt Staal and Marjolein Humme. This conference is internally for organizers, speakers and attendees.

Microsoft Fabric

For the RaboEngineeringWeek my first session is about Fabric. It was my first session ever about Fabric. I am totally unknown in this area, if you look at a deeper technical level. The session was setup to inform “Citizen Data Engineer” or better known as managers about what MicroSoft Fabric is and what they can do with it. There was a bit of background information, because I had talks with two other teams in the past to see where it would fit in the Rabo organisation. I started the session with a little poll about how many of the attendees had heard about Fabric before. 26 people filled it in and about 6 people had never heard about it before. I could not make this session without the support of various MicroSoft people.

Data API Builder

This session started with joking around with Chris Stapper. Because I present this from my private equipment, I had two camera’s turned on. One in mirror mode and the audience can see you twice… It is a nice way of joking around. Shortly after this I started the presentation on Data API Builder or DAB. It was an improved session of the DataWeekender one. Of course I removed all the Vans from the presentation. The improvements I made over the weekend helped me a lot. This session was going way more smooth. The session was attended by nearly 70 people, at least that is what I saw when looking at the other screen. Awesome result

SQL Usergroup Groningen

After my session at tuesday afternoon, I needed to rush to Groningen for the SQL Usergroup Meetup session. It was in person and that was good again. Not a real busy session but interesting enough looking at the talks afterwards. It was at least good to see a happy Hugo Kornelis who is doing presentations again after a full year being not able to do. Was not his first presentation, but for me it is a pleasure to see him again alive and kicking.

The session on its own was interesting for me. It was the first time to do DAB in dutch. Some good questions came out and discussions are, as always, relevant.

Thank you Reitse Eskens for organising the user group meeting and for having me.

Southampton Data Platform meeting

Wednesday evening my last session for this week is planned. I was surprised when the invite told me it was about Defender for SQL. That meant I did not fully prepare this one, but it is in stock. Two hours before the meeting I configured a VM named SOTON2023 and review the sheets. After a quick dinner I could do the presentation.

The presentation did go … so so.. what means it did not go bad, but Microsoft had moved some screens around in Azure recently which made me search for it. But after all, I am happy with it.

Thank you Mikey Bronowski for organising this meeting and for having me

Busy week comes to an end

After this evening, my sessions are done. Promises I have to full fill (for myself):

  • Create a Demo repository
  • Build up a working database and create a backup
  • Store the backup in the repo
  • Store the Setup scripts in the repo
  • Make use of the new SQLCMD to create the local database in a container with the backup
  • Continue the integration between my Hugo Website and DAB
  • Be sure that any other active Presentations are reviewed more often

Now, up to Ignite viewing next week and DataBash 23 at the 25th of November. Hope to see you around there.