When: Thursday 20th November 2025 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt. Location: Ecosurety, 2nd Floor, 4 Colston Ave, Bristol ​ BS1 4ST

Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our sponsor Method Resourcing Solutions.

Session 1 - Metadata-Driven Orchestration with Microsoft Fabric - Matt Collins Metadata-driven processing is something of a golden standard when it comes to analytics platforms. We’ll use this session to showcase an orchestration framework in Microsoft Fabric that relies on metadata to create a clean environment with parameterised pipelines, notebooks, and other objects, while considering the future-proofing a framework like this provides.​

About Matt Matt is a Senior Analytics Consultant working on end-to-end Data Platform solutions with the Microsoft Azure tech stack. He currently works at Cloud Formations, currently focusing on Data Engineering in both product development and delivery.

Session 2 - Do you really need a Data Lakehouse? Separating Hype from Business Need - Craig Porteous The Lakehouse promises to blend the best of data lakes and warehouses, but is it the right move for your organisation?​ Join this session to 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.​

About Craig Craig is a lifelong learner with a passion for creative problem-solving. He shares his expertise and insights with the data community through talks, video content, and bringing people together with the DATA:Scotland event.

We all look forward to seeing you there!!

Streaming data is hard and costly — that's the default opinion, but it doesn’t have to be.In this session, discover how SEGA simplified complex streaming pipelines and turned them into a competitive edge. SEGA sees over 40,000 events per second. That's no easy task, but enabling personalised gaming experiences for over 50 million gamers drives a huge competitive advantage. If you’re wrestling with streaming challenges, this talk is your next checkpoint.We’ll unpack how Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines helped SEGA, from automated schema evolution and simple data quality management to seamless streaming reliability. Learn how Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines drives value by transforming chaos emeralds into clarity, delivering results for a global gaming powerhouse. We'll step through the architecture, approach and challenges we overcame.Join Craig Porteous, Microsoft MVP from Advancing Analytics, and Felix Baker, Head of Data Services at SEGA Europe, for a fast-paced, hands-on journey into Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines’ unique powers.

When: Thursday 24th April 2025 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt Location: Robert Walters, Number 1 Spinningfields, Manchester, M3 3HF Session will not be streamed over MS Teams Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts & sponsors Robert Walters

April's PBIMCR will feature ..... Speaker Details - Rishi Sapra

Storytelling With Data

Communicating through telling stories is an innate part of what it means to be human. It’s what allows us to share beliefs and build connections in a way that the brains of other animal species simply aren’t wired to do. We’re used to telling stories through essays and creative writing, but when it comes to using data to tell these stories, people are often hesitant to adopt a stance and use data to argue it. If I’m a BI developer, how do I have the skills (or even the permission) to tell a data story for another part of the business? How can I tell a story over data that frequently changes?

But these are just excuses we make for not building the best data visualizations we know we can! By understanding the specific user personas who the report is for, we can make them the central characters of our data stories and highlight the “tension” (resolved through the storyboard!) that every good story needs.

But these are just excuses we make for not building the best data visualizations we know we can! By understanding the specific user personas who the report is for, we can make them the central characters of our data stories and highlight the “tension” (resolved through the storyboard!) that every good story needs.

In this session, Rishi will:

Walk through the core structure of a gripping story, showing how this translates into Power BI using techniques like pre-attentive attributes, presenting data as arguments (rather than just statements), and providing a “so what” conclusion to the story.

Showcase examples of visualizations he’s built for the community and highlight the data stories he was communicating with them.

Attendees will walk away with an understanding of how to communicate with data in a way that their audience enjoys consuming reports and is able to take action based on the contextualized data arguments presented.

This session is aimed at anyone who wants to understand the impact of data visualizations and how they can be used to effectively communicate what the data is really telling you, framed within the context that the author (report creator) injects into the narrative.

Speaker Details - Craig Porteous -Associate Head of Data Engineering at Advancing Analytics Topic:

Zero to Lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric

Fabric is Microsoft's unified software as a service data platform built around the Data Lakehouse architecture but do you create a Lakehouse, or a Warehouse, or both? How does it all fit together and how can you get the most out of it?

In this session I'll explain what all the components of Microsoft Fabric are, a few architecture patterns you can follow to get what you need, and demonstrate how you can bring them together to build a full data Lakehouse platform without ever touching an Azure resource. You will leave this session with a good understanding of Fabric, it's capabilities, and how you can use it.

About Craig: Data Platform MVP \| Associate Head of Engineering @ Advancing Analytics\| DATA:Scotland event founder \| He/Him. Glasgow, United Kingdom 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.

Details

Welcome to the Databricks Scotland Meetup in Glasgow! Whether you're a seasoned Databricks user, just dipping your toes, or simply intrigued about what the platform can offer, this meetup promises to deliver insights, best practices, and opportunities for networking with like-minded individuals. We hope to see you there!

Come join us for the Scotland Databricks meetup at BJSS, March 13th at 5.30pm for an evening of Databricks!

17:30 - 17:45 Welcome & Networking 17:45 - 18:30 Sean Caldwell 18:30 - 19:00 Networking, Food and Drinks 19:00 - 19:45 Networking, Food and Drinks

Spark up the Savings - Sean Caldwell

Migrating data ingestion Spark jobs from Databricks to AKS to allow more control over compute for each job. Reducing the overall cost of a data platform.

Fabric and Databricks: Better together? - Craig Porteous

Fabric is Microsoft's new unified data platform and with it brings many questions of which platform to choose, where does Databricks excel, What makes Fabric the right choice?

But it doesn't have to be a binary choice. Rather than thinking about which route to take, You can enrich your Databricks Data Lakehouse with Microsoft Fabric, taking advantage of Fabric's key features such as lightning fast Direct Lake connectivity from your Delta Lake to Power BI.

In this session we will deep dive into the synergistic relationship between Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric. Together these platforms can deliver performance and value in data analytics. We'll explore architecture patterns to enhance and augment your existing Databricks Lakehouse allowing you to fully harness key features in Fabric all built upon the same robust storage of Delta Lake.

We will also explore how the close integration of these platforms can lead to improved analytics capabilities, and ultimately, better business insights. Whether you are an analytics engineer looking to get the most out of your data, or a business leader seeking to drive data-driven decision making, this session will provide valuable insights into maximizing the potential of your data platform by bringing Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric together

About Us If you need to contact us for any reason you can email us at: [email protected] We are sponsored by:

• Databricks
• Advancing Analytics
• BJSS