talk-data.com

Network, learn, ask a question, meet other folks - these are all things that happen at user group events. These events are a really great opportunity to socialise in an informal learning experience.

Remember to tell your friends and the people you work with; make sure you register as soon as you can.

In-Person only event. Not being recorded.

17:45 – 18:00 Intro and updates 18:00 – 19:00 Srinivaas Jaganaathan: Bridging SQL Server and Power Platform: Automating Council Service Requests for Real Impact.

I will share how councils can break down data silos by connecting SQL Server with Power Platform and Azure to automate public service requests — everything from pothole fixes to noise complaints. You’ll see practical, hands-on ways to build workflows that speed up approvals, use data insights to prioritize cases, and keep citizens updated in real time. This session is for anyone curious about combining SQL, cloud tech, and automation to solve real-world problems. I’ll keep it practical, showing how you can leverage familiar tools to drive better outcomes in government or any service-driven organization.

19:00 – 19:15 Break & Pizza 19:15 – 20:15 Steve Powell : The new JSON data type and indexing features in SQL2025. What it is and is it worth it?

Steve has been working with SQL server for longer than he likes to admit and developing code for longer still. He works as a Lead Data Engineer for a Telecoms company, which is way less exciting than it sounds. He spends far too much time dodging meetings and cursing developers who think documentation is something that happens to other people, but its the only way he can fund his ongoing Lego addiction.

PyDataMCR September Talks

Continuing to kick this year off with some more great talks we are hosted this month by Krakenflex.

THE TALKS

Unlocking climate data for SME carbon accounting - Joss Bennett **"**99% of UK businesses are SMEs, and around three-quarters are sole traders… they account for 43-53% of UK businesses’ greenhouse gas emissions in aggregate” (Source: UK Finance). Net zero presents a real challenge for SMEs in the UK, with tough an economic landscape and growing regulatory requirements which is taking the form of cascading requirements for climate disclosure originating from large multinationals down the supply-chain.

Increasing tools to automate data analysis, which overcome traditional hurdles of admin time and quality to reporting have emerged. Focusing on a spend-based assessment to identify areas for data improvement and ultimately collecting supplier-specific data will encourage action over paralysis to enable effective value-chain decarbonisation.

Joss Bennett, Sustainability, Energy and Carbon Reporting Lead for Perse.io. With 6 years of career operating across the UK sustainability landscape Joss has driven environmental campaigns with organisations such as Blake Made and Treeapp, respectively. This cumulated in a founding associates position, as the Lead Carbon Consultant, for Manchester based (UK) sustainability software start-up NetZero.co.uk.

Joss was a Senior Consultant at Green Economy, part of the social enterprise The Growth Company, implementing Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s decarbonisation targets. He has recently accepted a position at Perse.io to enable the widespread automation of utility data for systemic decarbonisation across the UK and beyond.

Rapidly Prototyping RAG applications using Local Models - Saurav Maheshkar Saurav will discuss the process of making performant RAG applications using LlamaIndex and local models. Walking through an example use-case: scraping data from the internet, creating a local embedding and LLM model, generating a vector index, and running queries. We will also discuss LLMOps best practices and create a quick UI for the application using Gradio and Hugging Face Spaces.

Saurav Maheshkar is a Machine Learning Engineer at LightlyAI (Ex: Re:course AI, Weights & Biases). He’s also a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning and is interested in Geometric Deep Learning and Representation Learning. He’s passionate about open source and enjoys delivering talks.

Small Data - Dealing with Climate uncertainty - Josh Hayes

Climate change is impacting everyone, and business activities are one of the primary sources of emissions, financial institutions need to take responsibility for their share of these emissions.

The Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) have set regulatory requirements for financial institutions to disclose their financed emissions. The requirements for disclosures is tricky, as lenders need to understand their customers' emissions. As many businesses do not disclose their own emissions, a range of methodologies must be used.

Josh will explore the data challenges faced by financial institutions, provide an explanation of the standard methodologies used to estimate finances emissions, and introduce the idea of data quality scores, a metric that can be used to indicate the quality of an emissions estimate in lieu of a quantified confidence interval.

Josh has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Manchester in 2021, where he was using Bayesian modelling to explore exoplanetary atmospheres. After completing his thesis, he worked at NatWest, where he has been the technical lead behind the calculation of the bank's emissions. He is leading research streams into significant methodological improvements, whilst supporting on multiple additional climate initiatives.

LOCATION We'll be at Krakenflex, who are also kindly supplying catering. The capacity is limited to 90.

After the talks we'll all head somewhere local for some post-event socialising.

EVENT GUIDELINES PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.

PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct

https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html

Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY Under 16s welcome with a responsible guardian. There is a quiet room available if needed. Toilets are accessible!

SPONSORS Thank you to NUMFocus for sponsoring Meetup and further support Thank you to AutoTrader for sponsoring PyDataMCR. Thank you to Krakenflex for sponsoring PyDataMCR, as well as hosting this event!

PyDataMCR September!

THE TALKS

Going above and Beyond for Good: Helping a Charity with Data Acquisition and Quality- Kaily Newman (she/her)

Kaily is a Data Engineer at Accenture, she joined the tech industry 2 years ago as a career changer. She loves empowering others, including democratising access to knowledge and especially tech, motorsports, and perfumes.

LinkedIn

Streamlit in Python: Guide to present your ML Models easily by creating Web-App Interfaces with less code - Yash Sakhuja (he/him)

Yash is a MSc Business Analytics student at University of Manchester and has recently finished a research project with Lancashire County Cricket Club.

LinkedIn

We'll be at AutoTrader Manchester, who are kindly supplying catering. The capacity is limited to 60.

EVENT GUIDELINES

PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.

PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct

https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html

Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY

Under 16s welcome with a responsible guardian. There is a quiet room available if needed. Toilets are accessible, so I am hoping the venue is too but looking for more details!

SPONSORS

Thank you to NUMFocus for sponsoring Meetup and further support

Thank you to Infinity Works for an awesome, hybrid-ready venue and catering!