Ethics in artificial intelligence (AI)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen In this article I will explore some important concepts including: But before we can decide what is wrong and what is right we need to understand what AI actually is. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Official definitions of AI ranges from “…systems or machines that mimic human intelligence to perform tasks and […]
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The Purple Peeps Seven Favourites from Ignite 2021
What a wonderful couple of days at Ignite! It’s fascinating to hear all these exciting announcements and top tips from experts globally. One of the best things about being a Microsoft Partner is the access to the technologies, products and tech community, and all these together, empower us to drive impact so we can accelerate […]
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Defining Analytics
Data Analytics used to be a buzzword. It no longer is. It is now a standard business requirement. Over the past decade we have gone from asking “Does your business need data analytics?”, to “How can data analytics transform your business?” Simply put, analytics has become essential to the growth and development of the modern […]
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Azure Purview, does it fill the data governance blind spot for Microsoft? (Part 2)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Welcome back to Part 2 of this blog on Azure Purview. In this instalment continuing from Part 1, I will go through a detailed review and highlights of Purview. Azure Purview – classifications and sensitivity: When the scan completes all data meeting classification rules will be discoverable, whereas Purview’s sensitivity labelling needs […]
Read MoreAzure Purview, does it fill the data governance blind spot for Microsoft? (Part 1)
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Data enablement – can Azure Purview help For several years now, I have been evangelising about the need for data enablement in organisations. In a nutshell, this means getting data to consumers (be it final consumers of reports, or consumers who go on to create data solutions such as data engineers, data […]
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Reasons to avoid gradient backgrounds on Power BI reports
Gradient backgrounds are all the rage in dashboard design. They appear to be floating around everywhere. Looks cool right? Perhaps. I am not a fan, and for some time have found it hard to articulate to others why this is the case. My verbal utterances were never much more than “it makes me go cross-eyed […]
Read More7 Favourite Power BI Summit Sessions from the Purple Peeps
The Power BI Summit was hosted by RADACAD with some 1000+ attendees and 100+ speakers – a mix of the Power BI Product team, Microsoft MVPs and Professionals. The sessions were targeted for beginner to intermediate level users with some more advanced topics available. By far the biggest value came from Q&A sessions, hearing from […]
Read MoreExposé at Ignite 2021 – our main takeaways
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen The Microsoft technology stack, specifically Azure, has over the past few years provided many best-of-breeds solutions to common data problems and tackled the data analytics domain with a different approach to its competitors (AWS and GCP). And recent changes saw them consolidate and tightly couple some of the key data resources which […]
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exposé Digital Twin – an ABA100 Winner for New Product Innovation in The Australian Business Awards 2020
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen We are excited to announce that the exposé Digital Twin has been recognised as an ABA100 Winner in The Australian Business Awards 2020 for New Product Innovation. Now in their fifteenth year, The Australian Business Awards program recognises organisations for the successful development of new and improved products and services and for […]
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Azure Synapse Analytics – the essential Spark cheat sheet
Author: Nghia Nguyen In this article, I take the Apache Spark service for a test drive. It is the third in our Synapse series: The first article provides an overview of Azure Synapse, and in our second, we take the SQL on-demand feature for a test drive and provided some resulting observations. This article contains […]
Read MoreAzure Synapse Analytics – the essential SQL on-demand cheat sheet
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen Disclaimer: as Azure Synapse Analytics is still in Public Preview, some areas may not yet function as it will in a full General Availability stage. This article contains the Synapse SQL on-demand test drive as well as a cheat sheet that describes how to get up and running step-by-step. I then conclude […]
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Azure Synapse Analytics – Insights for all and breaking down silos
Author: Etienne Oosthuysen (And a party down the lakehouse) Cloud databases are a way for enterprises to avoid large capital expenditures, they can be provisioned quickly, and they can provide performance at scale. But data workloads continue to change, fast, which means conventional databases alone (including those running in data warehouse configurations) can no longer […]
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