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In this session, you will learn how Microsoft Fabric can elevate your data architecture with Real-Time Intelligence.

The Medallion architecture has been a standard lake-centric approach for the past decade.

However, it primarily follows a batch processing model, where data freshness ranges from hours to days. This approach often relies on numerous plug-and-play components for scheduling, orchestration, and big data processing, requiring large, CPU-intensive clusters.

With Real-Time Intelligence, Microsoft Fabric enables you to apply the familiar three-stage Medallion pattern while processing data as it arrives.

This ensures real-time data freshness and eliminates the need for complex orchestration pipelines.

By leveraging built-in, native mechanisms for transforming and enriching incoming data, Microsoft Fabric simplifies data workflows while maintaining best practices.

When: Thursday 20th February 2025 Time: arrive for 5:45pm with talks starting from 6pm start prompt.

Location: BJSS, 90 Victoria St, Redcliffe, BS1 6DP

Complimentary drinks & pizza provided by our hosts BJSS

Social drinks afterwards will be at Ye Shakespeare (50m away) for those interested.

This #MSFABRICBRISTOL will feature Chris Barber and Rishi Sapra

Session 1 - P&L Models - Chris Barber Profitability is a key metric; any profits can be distributed back to shareholders (owners) either directly or indirectly. A profit and loss (P&L) statement answers high level questions - such as “what was net profit last year?” - and summarises key revenue (i.e., product revenue) and expense (i.e., Research & Development) items. Unlike static reports, a P&L semantic model contains the detail; this allows end-users to ask questions such as “what was R&D spending broken down by a particular research project, fiscal period, or legal entity?” A semantic model also allows end-users to consume information using Copilot prompts, Power BI reports, or Pivot Tables and formulas in Excel. In this session, we will go through:

• Why you should build an income statement semantic model
• How to use an accelerator to speed up development.
• The key questions you need to ask stakeholders.
• The challenges in building a P&L income statement

About Chris Chris Barber is a chartered accountant (ACMA, CGMA), 4 times Microsoft MVP, author of Income Statement Semantic Models, runs StarSchema.co.uk, and has popular YouTube videos (over 100k views) and courses (over 1k participants) on the topic of Profit and Loss (P&L) using Power BI.

Session 2 - Financial Reporting in PBI - Rishi Sapra This session will explore how to transform a traditional Excel-based credit rating model for countries into a modern, interactive, and scalable solution using Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. Participants will discover innovative techniques to enhance financial modelling and storytelling by leveraging advanced analytics and integration capabilities.

Hear from Power Platform in Finance specialist and Microsoft MVP, Rishi Sapra, as we delve into the following areas:

• Replicating Complex Rating Logic: Translating intricate credit rating formulas and methodologies from Excel into DAX to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Interactive Insights: Using slicers, bookmarks, and contextual visualizations in Power BI to enable dynamic comparisons and highlight key drivers of credit ratings.
• Streamlined Reporting: Designing intuitive and user-friendly reports that empower stakeholders to explore insights interactively.
• Scalability with Microsoft Fabric: Harnessing the Medallion Lakehouse architecture to enable seamless data integration, metadata management, and collaboration at an enterprise level.

This session is particularly beneficial for finance professionals and analysts who are seeking to modernize their financial or operational models. Attendees will leave with practical strategies to maintain model accuracy, enhance interactivity, and scale their solutions to meet the evolving demands of modern analytics.

About Rishi Rishi has a unique blend of technical and commercial skills - he is a 5x Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a Chartered Accountant, a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) and an Executive MBA (Hons) holder with a first class degree from the London School of Economics.

He currently works as a Data & AI Strategic Project lead at Avanade - a Joint Venture between Accenture and Microsoft which been awarded Microsoft Partner of the Year 18 times! In this role he focuses on Microsoft Fabric Go To Market (GTM) offerings including those around Security & Governance, Industry/Functional accelerators and Azure/BI migration.

Prior to joining Altius in 2017 (Which was acquired by Avanade in 2020), he spent 12 years in the Big 4 /Financial Services (Deloitte, HSBC, Barclays, KPMG) and has a strong background in Business modelling and process improvement.

He is actively involved in the Fabric Community in London/globally and has presented at Meetup groups and several large-scale conferences. His passion is in helping organisations achieve the holy grail of Self-Service BI and helping individuals learn the necessary skills to succeed. Under his community Learn Data Insights (www.learndatainsights.com), he runs Microsoft Fabric Training (www.msfabrictraining.com) and Power Platform Finance (www.powerplatformfinance.com) with e-learning courses and quizzes for Analytics and Finance professionals.

We all look forward to seeing you there!!

Summary

Data lakehouse architectures have been gaining significant adoption. To accelerate adoption in the enterprise Microsoft has created the Fabric platform, based on their OneLake architecture. In this episode Dipti Borkar shares her experiences working on the product team at Fabric and explains the various use cases for the Fabric service.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Data lakes are notoriously complex. For data engineers who battle to build and scale high quality data workflows on the data lake, Starburst is an end-to-end data lakehouse platform built on Trino, the query engine Apache Iceberg was designed for, with complete support for all table formats including Apache Iceberg, Hive, and Delta Lake. Trusted by teams of all sizes, including Comcast and Doordash. Want to see Starburst in action? Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/starburst and get $500 in credits to try Starburst Galaxy today, the easiest and fastest way to get started using Trino. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Dipti Borkar about her work on Microsoft Fabric and performing analytics on data withou

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Microsoft Fabric is and the story behind it? Data lakes in various forms have been gaining significant popularity as a unified interface to an organization's analytics. What are the motivating factors that you see for that trend? Microsoft has been investing heavily in open source in recent years, and the Fabric platform relies on several open components. What are the benefits of layering on top of existing technologies rather than building a fully custom solution?

What are the elements of Fabric that were engineered specifically for the service? What are the most interesting/complicated integration challenges?

How has your prior experience with Ahana and Presto informed your current work at Microsoft? AI plays a substantial role in the product. What are the benefits of embedding Copilot into the data engine?

What are the challenges in terms of safety and reliability?

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen the Fabric platform used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on data lakes generally, and Fabric specifically? When is Fabric the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of data lake analytics?

Contact Info

LinkedIn

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected] with your story.

Links

Microsoft Fabric Ahana episode DB2 Distributed Spark Presto Azure Data MAD Landscape

Podcast Episode ML Podcast Episode

Tableau dbt Medallion Architecture Microsoft Onelake ORC Parquet Avro Delta Lake Iceberg

Podcast Episode

Hudi

Podcast Episode

Hadoop PowerBI

Podcast Episode

Velox Gluten Apache XTable GraphQL Formula 1 McLaren

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Sponsored By: Starburst:

This episode is brought to you by Starburst - an end-to-end data lakehouse platform for data engineers who are battling to build and scale high quality data pipelines on the data lake. Powered by T

Venue: Riverbank House, 2 Swan Ln, London EC4R 3AD - IMPORTANT: LOCATION UPDATED! Please note:

1. 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. 🚨🚨🚨
2. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event.

If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.

If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as you know.

Code of Conduct: This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct.

As always, there'll be free food & drinks, generously provided by our host, Man Group.

Main Talks

Microsoft Fabric for Python Data Developers - Barry Smart Fabric is a major new development from Microsoft where Python is treated as a first class citizen. This talk will provide an overview of Microsoft Fabric through the lens of a Python Data developer, with demos showing how Python can be used to build cloud native, enterprise grade data pipelines on the platform. It will also touch on concepts such as lakehouse, data mesh, medallion architecture and star schemas - all fundamental building blocks of a modern cloud native data architecture.

Desert Island Docker: Python Edition - Andrew Collier What 3 Docker images would you choose if you were shipwrecked on a desert island? Choosing the right images will determine whether you are rescued or end up in a cannibals' cooking pot (Python images will make you particularly unpalatable).

Docker is an essential tool for survival as a Python developer, regardless of whether you are stranded or not. In this talk I'll describe three Python Docker images that I consider essential for survival on a desert island. I'll demonstrate how to set up and build a custom image. And finally I'll demonstrate how using a Docker image can simplify CI/CD and deployment.

⚡ Lightning Talks 1️⃣ Why You Should Be Afraid of Pickles - Rikard Anglerud

2️⃣ ASCII Art with Python - Hugh Evans

Logistics Doors open at 6.30 pm (get there early as you have to sign-in via building security), talks start at 7 pm, drinks from 9 pm in the bar. We will have reduced capacity for this event but there will be plenty of people to discuss data science questions with!

Please unRSVP in good time if you realise you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members!

Follow @pydatalondon (https://twitter.com/pydatalondon) for updates and early announcements.

Dive into the wonders of Microsoft Fabric, the ultimate solution for mastering data analytics in the AI era. Through engaging real-world examples and hands-on scenarios, this book will equip you with all the tools to design, build, and maintain analytics systems for various use cases like lakehouses, data warehouses, real-time analytics, and data science. What this Book will help me do Understand and utilize the key components of Microsoft Fabric for modern analytics. Build scalable and efficient data analytics solutions with medallion architecture. Implement real-time analytics and machine learning models to derive actionable insights. Monitor and administer your analytics platform for high performance and security. Leverage AI-powered assistant Copilot to boost analytics productivity. Author(s) Arshad Ali and None Schacht bring years of expertise in data analytics and system architecture to this book. Arshad is a seasoned professional specialized in AI-integrated analytics platforms, while None Schacht has a proven track record in deploying enterprise data solutions. Together, they provide deep insights and practical knowledge with a structured and approachable teaching method. Who is it for? Ideal for data professionals such as data analysts, engineers, scientists, and AI/ML experts aiming to enhance their data analytics skills and master Microsoft Fabric. It's also suited for students and new entrants to the field looking to establish a firm foundation in analytics systems. Requires a basic understanding of SQL and Spark.