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This month we’re delighted to be joined by Tesco’s Head of Data and we’ll also hear about the latest in AI Governance on Databricks from the Advancing Analytics team!

17:30 - 18:00: Arrival & Networking 18:00 - 18:10: Opening Remarks & Introductions

18:10 - 18:40: Building Sustainable Data Products with AI Readiness at Scale for Cyber - Varun S Gangoor - Head of Data at Tesco In this session, we’ll explore how sustainable data product design can enable AI readiness and drive innovation in cybersecurity. We’ll look at the key principles behind building scalable, secure and reusable data products that support cyber analytics, machine learning and GenAI use cases at scale. We’ll also discuss practical approaches to data governance, automation and platform engineering that help cyber teams turn data into actionable intelligence and strengthen overall cyber resilience.

18.40-19.10 Governing AI In Databricks: Building Trust And Compliance At Scale - Gavi Regunath, Advancing Analytics CAIO and Databricks MVP, joined by Terry McCann, Advancing Analytics CEO AI governance isn’t optional - it’s foundational. With 45% of organisations concerned about data accuracy and bias, and 40% worried about privacy, the need for robust oversight is clear. From model safety to compliance tooling, we’ll show how to embed trust into your AI systems, without slowing innovation.

19:00 onwards: Pizza, Drinks & Networking Enjoy some delicious pizza and beverages while networking with peers.

Join us for a fantastic evening of learning and networking at the London Databricks meetup!

Join us for our very first meetup of 2025! You'll learn all about how to use Apache Kafka beyond the consumer protocol and get an introduction to Apache Flink.

Date and Time: 🗓️ Thursday 23rd January, ⏰ 18:00 - 20:30 PM 🕘 Venue: Confluent Europe Ltd, 262 High Holborn, London WC1V 7EE, United Kingdom Attending Brands: OSO, Streambased, Gravitee & Confluent

Schedule: 18:00: Doors Open 18:00 - 18:30: Food, drinks, networking 18:30 - 19:00: "Accessing Kafka: beyond the consumer protocol" - Tom Scott (CEO Streambased) & Linus Hakansson (CPO Gravitee) 19:00 - 19:30: “Flink - Adi Polak (Director Developer Experience Engineering and Advocacy, Confluent) 19:30- 20:30pm: Additional Q&A, Networking

🎙️ \~Talk 1\~ Talk Title: Accessing Kafka: beyond the consumer protocol

Summary: The role of Kafka is expanding and with it the use cases it addresses. This brings many cool new features but also highlights some drawbacks. The standard producer/consumer pattern that has served us so well for so many years is no longer a good fit for all the things that Kafka data is used for and it's time to look beyond.Join Linus (Gravitee) and Tom (Streambased) for an in depth look at how you can interact with you Kafka clusters via REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, JDBC/ODBC and even as a simple filesystem.We'll outline the reasoning behind these new access patterns, the features that differentiate them (and the features that unite them) and show some live demos of the opportunities they create.

🗣️ Speaker 1: Tom Scott (CEO Streambased) is the founder of Streambased, Tom is building multi tenant, on-prem and cloud Kafka services to attack common Kafka pain points and break down barriers to starting your data journey.Linus Hakansson Linus Hakansson is the Chief Product Officer at Gravitee, building a next-generation management platform helping organizations secure, control and govern their Kafka and APIs

🗣️ Speaker 2: Linus Hakansson is the Chief Product Officer at Gravitee, building a next-generation management platform helping organizations secure, control and govern their Kafka and APIs

🎙️ \~Talk 2\~ Talk Title: Flink - demystifying data streaming

Summary: In an era where data velocity and volume continue to grow, the ability to process and analyze data streams in real-time is pivotal for businesses aiming to optimize operations, enhance decision-making, and maintain competitive advantages.

Apache Flink stands out as a comprehensive, open-source stream processing framework designed to meet these challenges head-on. In this session you will learn about data streaming through the lens of Apache Flink, offering insights into its architecture, capabilities, and how it seamlessly facilitates real-time data processing.Objectives: 1. Introduce Stream Processing: Provide a foundational understanding of stream processing - its importance\, use cases\, and when to use in comparison to batch processing. 2. Explore Apache Flink: Deep dive into Apache Flink's architecture\, key features\, and its unique approach to handling stateful computations\, event time processing\, and ensuring fault tolerance at scale.

🗣️ Speaker 1: Adi Polak, Director Developer Experience Engineering and Advocacy, Confluent. Adi is an experienced software engineer and people manager. For most of her professional life, she dealt with data and machine learning for transactional and analytics workloads by building large-scale systems. As a data practitioner, she developed software to solve real-world problems with Apache Spark, Kafka, HDFS, K8s, AWS, and Azure in high-throughput, high-scale production environments for companies like Akamai and Microsoft.Adi has taught Spark to thousands of students throughout the years and is the author of the successful book — Scaling Machine Learning with Spark.

When not thinking up new architecture, teaching new tech or pondering on a distributed systems challenge, you can find her at the local cultural scene.

We're excited to be back after the summer, and looking forward to hosting Will Needham for September's London Fabric User Group meetup.

Life after DP-600: How to thrive as a Fabric Analytics Engineer

Many people have now taken the DP-600 exam to become a certified Fabric Analytics Engineer - which serves as a great stepping stone into the world of analytics engineering. But when I speak to people in the community, there still seems to be a knowledge and experience gap for many on how to make to jump to becoming an effective Fabric Analytics Engineer, in practice.

In this talk, we will explore together what an effective analytics engineering solution looks like, and provide a roadmap for you to follow to become comfortable creating such solutions.

You will learn:

• which problems analytics engineering solves
• what skills make an effective Analytics Engineer in practice
• how you can transfer existing skills and experience you have to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Analytics engineering is (in my biased opinion) one of the highest leverage capabilities that a data professional, and a company, can develop because it unlocks high-quality, analytics that you can rely on (whether that be AI or BI). I can't wait to share my passion on this topic with you all!

About Will: Will Needham is the Director of Unified Education, a Fabric-focused training company. Will created the Learn Microsoft Fabric with Will YouTube channel in June 2023 which has grown to over 16k subscribers and 650k views. As well as the YouTube channel, Will runs two Fabric learning communities on the Skool platform; "Learn Microsoft Fabric" - a free community with over 3.9k members, and a paid community Fabric Dojo which provides high-quality, hands-on tutorials to help members grow their Fabric Analytics Engineering skills and experience. Before starting Unified Education, Will worked for 8+ years as a consultant working across Data Strategy, Data Engineering, Data Science & Business Intelligence.

Agenda: 18:30 : Welcome, pizza and drinks 19:00 - 20:00 : Main Session

Big thanks again to the London Data School for hosting us in their amazing venue in the heart of London, close to St Paul's Cathedral:

The Data School / The Information Lab, Floor 1, 25 Watling Street, EC4M 9BR

What are dbt meetups? dbt Meetups are networking events open to all folks working with data! Talks predominantly focus on community members' experience with dbt, however, you'll catch presentations on broader topics such as analytics engineering, data stacks, data ops, modeling, testing, and team structures.

To attend, please read the Health and Safety Policy and Terms of Participation: https://www.getdbt.com/legal/health-and-safety-policy

🇬🇧 Join the conversation in the #local-ldn channel in dbt Slack to follow speaking/hosting opportunities and news on upcoming meetups. ➡️ Receive an invite to join the dbt Slack community: https://community.getdbt.com/

🤝 Organizer: Datatonic 🏠 Venue: Datatonic's Offices, Level 45, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf

✨ Agenda & Speakers ✨

1. 17.30: Drinks & Food
2. 18.30: Streamlining Incremental Models with Delta Tracking - George Jones & Arun Kumaravel\, Analytics Engineers @ VMO2
3. 19.00: Accelerating our journey to powerful customer insights - Holly Foster, Data Lead @ Trinny London
4. 19:30 Networking

dbt is the standard in data transformation, used by over 30,000 organizations worldwide. Through the application of software engineering best practices like modularity, version control, testing, and documentation, dbt’s analytics engineering workflow helps teams work more efficiently to produce data the entire organization can trust. Learn more: https://www.getdbt.com/

*** NEW VENUE *** Please note the change of venue for this meetup

Big thanks again to the London Data School for hosting us. Following the success of June's meetup, they've again offered their amazing venue in the heart of London, close to St Paul's Cathedral.

We're really excited to be able to host Reza Rad, CEO of RADACAD, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Regional Director. Reza is over from New Zealand for a short visit.

Microsoft Fabric for Power BI Developers

Come to this session to learn from Reza about Microsoft Fabric, its workloads and components, and how it can deliver an end-to-end analytics solution.

You will get a whirlwind tour of Microsoft Fabric's end-to-end analytics workloads, including, but not limited to, Data Factory, Data Warehousing, Data Engineering, Data Science, Real-time Analytics, Power BI, Data Activator, and OneLake. You will learn these components and how they work together to build a software-as-service analytics solution.

You will also learn how this would impact the career opportunity for someone in the Analytics field and the licensing requirements for this new service.

You will get to know Fabric from the Power BI development point of view; what changes it will bring, what improvements, how it can help your Power BI implementation, and what will be the next step for you if you want to use Fabric in your environment.

No background in analytics is needed for this session; it is an introductory session to Microsoft Fabric.

More information on our speaker, Reza can be found here: Reza Rad - RADACAD

Agenda: 18:30 : Welcome, pizza and drinks 19:00 - 20:00 : Main Session

Huge thanks to The Data School for hosting this month's meetup: The Data School / The Information Lab, Floor 1, 25 Watling Street, EC4M 9BR

dbt Meetups are gatherings dedicated to helping you own your analytics engineering workflow. Events will focus on the impact of dbt in the data community and professional development tools for analytics engineers.

Expect big-picture conversations related to the data stacks, data operations, data teams, modelling, testing, dashboards, etc. If you work with data, this group is for you! We welcome data analysts, scientists, engineers, architects, and more!! ----------------------------------- 🇬🇧 Join the conversation in the #local-ldn channel in dbt Slack to follow speaking/hosting opportunities and news on upcoming meetups. ➡️ Receive an invite to join the dbt Slack community: https://community.getdbt.com/

🤝 Organizer: Datatonic 🏠 Venue: Datatonic's Offices, Level 45, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf

✨ Agenda & Speakers ✨

1. 17.30: Drinks & Food
2. 18.30: Automated rollback dbt model transformations for models with failed tests - Catalin Bobarnac\, Senior Solution Architect @ Snowflake
3. 19.00: Targeted, limited & automated backfilling through incremental strategy - Ash Sultan, Lead Data Architect @ Datatonic
4. 19:30 Networking

To attend, please read the Required Participation Language for In-Person Events with dbt Labs: https://bit.ly/3QIJXFb

Agenda 18:00 - 18:15 - Welcome 18:15 - 19:00 - Old Name - New CLI - why you should take a look at sqlcmd - Rob Sewell Introduced with SQL Server 2005 and replacing osql, sqlcmd has been a part of SQL Server professionals toolbox for a long time now. Many people only know it from the sqlcmd mode switch in SSMS, while others use it within automation as a lightweight easily available query runner. I have long recommended that DBAs are familiar with using it as it may be the only option to query an instance in severe emergencies. Times they are a changing. There is a new sqlcmd available and it has some awesome new capabilities. Let me introduce you to the new sqlcmd in a fun filled demo session and show you the new things it can do and why they will be of benefit to all Data Professionals We will cover deploying a database into a container from a backup with one command. Querying it, Opening it in Azure Data Studio, all from the command line and much more.

Rob Sewell Be-Whiskered Automator of Things Rob was a SQL Server DBA with a passion for PowerShell, Azure, Automation, and SQL (PaaS geddit?). Now he just helps people make things. He is a Cloud and Data Center MVP and a Data Platform MVP, SQLBits committee member, PSConf EU organiser, and co-leader of Data South West UK User Group. H has spoken at and volunteered at many Data and PowerShell events all over the world. He is a proud supporter of the Data and PowerShell communities. He relishes sharing and learning and can be found doing both via Twitter and his blog. He spends most of his time looking at a screen and loves to solve problems. He knows that looking at a screen so much is bad for him because his wife tells him so. Thus, he is often out riding his bike as his eyes are not good enough to play cricket any more. He has a fabulous beard

17:30 - Pizza and networking

19:30 - 20:45 - Realtime streaming data with Microsoft Fabric - James Dales Realtime streaming data is now possible within Microsoft’s new SaaS environment, Microsoft Fabric, without any Azure resources required. In this session we’ll stream data from aircraft transponder data and other sensors directly into Microsoft Fabric via EventStream into KQL DB and OneLake, and analyse the results, both live and historic in Power BI. The session will be back to back demos as we build the whole solution from scratch – what could go wrong!?

James Dales James Dales is the Global Capability Lead for Microsoft Fabric and Power BI at Avanade and is a Microsoft FastTrack Recognised Solution Architect. As a Microsoft Data Platform MVP he is the co-leader of the London Power BI user group. In 2019 he became the first member of the Power BI Contributors Program, working alongside the Microsoft engineering team to build new functionality into the Power BI product itself. He has a keen interest in spatial analytics and is the author of the Icon Map custom visual.

dbt Meetups are gatherings dedicated to helping you own your analytics engineering workflow. Events will focus on the impact of dbt in the data community and professional development tools for analytics engineers.

Expect big-picture conversations related to the data stacks, data operations, data teams, modelling, testing, dashboards, etc. If you work with data, this group is for you! We welcome data analysts, scientists, engineers, architects, and more!! ----------------------------------- 🇬🇧 Join the conversation in the #local-ldn channel in dbt Slack to follow speaking/hosting opportunities and news on upcoming meetups. ➡️ Receive an invite to join the dbt Slack community: https://community.getdbt.com/

🤝 Organizer: Datatonic 🏠 Venue: Datatonic's Offices, Level 45, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf

✨ Agenda & Speakers ✨

1. 17.30: Drinks & Food
2. 18.30: Amplifying Insights: Leveraging GenAI in Analytics - Christelle Xu\, ML Strategy Lead @ Datatonic
3. 18:55: ChatGPT and the Future of Analytics Engineering - Mark Rittman, CEO @ Rittman Analytics
4. 19:25 Networking

To attend, please read the Required Participation Language for In-Person Events with dbt Labs: https://bit.ly/3QIJXFb