*** 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

Hi everyone

Thanks for your patience while we confirmed all the details for June's events. Last month we renamed the London Power BI User Group to the London Fabric User Group to recognise the broad range of capabilities, including Power BI, that are available as part Microsoft Fabric - announced on the day of the last user group.

Whilst we were exited to bring you the announcements hot off the press as they were being announced in Seattle, it was a little frustrating not being able to show you Fabric, so we promised that we'd arrange this for the next session.

So for this month's meetup, we have two great sessions lined up for you.

Session 1 with Mathias Thierbach:

What's new for Power BI Source Control

Learn about three recent substantial innovations for Power BI Pro Developers: TMDL, Power BI Developer Mode, and Workspace Git Integration. TMDL, the new Tabular Model Definition Language, was announced in Public Preview in April 2023. It is a new declarative format for Power BI tabular models that is designed to be human readable and editable as well as collaborative. It is perfectly suited for use of source control and CI/CD when developing tabular models in a professional environment. Mathias contributed the language design and implementation to the Power BI product team as part of their Community Contributor Program. Learn from him, first-hand, what it is all about, how TMDL works, what problems it solves, and which tools are available. Power BI Developer Mode, released in Preview in Power BI Desktop June 2023, enables developer-centric workflows for reports and datasets. Instead of binary .PBIX files, Power BI projects are saved into a source-control friendly text format. Many people have been waiting for this feature for years! See how works, and what workflows it enables. Thirdly, the recent release of Microsoft Fabric has brought native git integration to Fabric/Power BI workspaces. Initially limited to Power BI reports and datasets, alongside Power BI Desktop Developer Mode. How is it enabled, what are the limitations during Preview, and what's coming?

• TMDL Announcement
• learn.microsoft.com: TMDL Overview
• Power BI Developer Mode (Release Plan)
• Introducing Git Integration
• Fabric Git Integration Docs

Bio:

Head of Finance Systems at YouGov Plc, Data Platform MVP, and Developer of pbi-tools In 2015, after having spent over ten years as a Software Developer and Architect with Microsoft technologies, Mathias Thierbach moved into the Microsoft BI space. He soon landed on Power BI, but also realized quickly that the development and engineering tools and practices were nothing like the ones well established in software development. This is how pbi-tools started as a project, the only complete source control solution for Power BI. Today, leading a growing data management team at YouGov, he experiences the benefits of those efforts every day. Having open sourced the project in fall of 2021, Mathias spends a lot of his free time bringing source control and DevOps practices to the wider Power BI community now. In addition to his open source engagements, Mathias cares deeply about his role as an enterprise technology leader. Like many, once having started as a single contributor technologist, he had to pivot significantly when he moved into a manager role, responsible for building, stabilizing and growing a team of data engineers, analysts and architects. Mathias is now passionately sharing the many experiences and learnings that came out of that journey with the community.

Session 2 with Kasper de Jonge:

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is here, and it fundamentally changes our data landscape. It introduces a Power BI like SaaS model for the data platform. You can now with a few clicks ingest data into the cloud by running pipelines, create a Lakehouse to make that data accessible and run Python, Spark, SQL and DAX on top of it. All in a single tenant, with single security as a SaaS platform.

In this demo filled session we will do a general overview of Microsoft Fabric so you will understand concept like OneLake, OneCopy and see how the workloads all work together. If you want to set up yourself and your career for success with Microsoft Fabric, this is the session for you!

Bio:

Kasper de Jonge is a Principal Program Manager on the Power BI team at Microsoft, where he has worked on developing features for Power BI, Power Pivot and other Analysis Services products such as the Tabular model and Multidimensional cubes.

VENUE: We will meet at the Nigel Frank Offices at 60 Great Tower Street. If you've not been there before, it's just a little further up the street from Brewdog. Google Maps link to help you find the building: https://goo.gl/maps/GRZWr5LfScZhApu6A