Microsoft AI, Data, and Power Platform Conference 30-31 May 2022

Difinity is the largest Microsoft Data, AI, Power BI, Power Platform and Business Applications Conference in New Zealand focusing on Data Platform, AI, Business Intelligence, Business Applications, Power Platform, and Analytics. IT Decision Makers, Developers, Business Analysts, IT Professionals, BI Managers, BI Professionals, Database Administrators, Architects, Digital & Big Data business leaders, and Consultants will gather for two consecutive days of learning.

Difinity Conference been running in New Zealand since 2017, and this would be our 5th year’s anniversary event. We want to make it an special event full of learning, fun, and networking opportunities.

Sessions:

A deep dive into Microsoft Conversational AI stack

According to Gartner, by 2022, 70% of customer interactions will involve bots — an increase of 15% from 2018. Another research shows that bots are going to take over nearly 25% of the retail operations across the world. Think about staff-less grocery stores, automated agents for the banks and your next best action predictor in any shopping app. Do you want to build the similar experience for this new user interface paradigm? If yes then you’re at the right place!

In this session, you will learn everything about building bots using improved Microsoft Bot Framework from design to publishing it to multiple channels such as Microsoft Teams, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and much more.

In addition to this, you will also get a chance to learn about a low code visual designer Composer which enables you to build the bots without writing the code and allows you to extend your bots built on Power Virtual Agents.

Furthermore, you will also get a chance to learn about the AI and natural language capabilities of Conversational Interfaces along with the different set of bot framework cli tools to accelerate the bot development.

All in all, it’s going to be fun for those who are building bots and publishing it to the world.

• Intermediate
• Azure
• AI

Accessible Power BI: Visualization Tips and Tricks

Design for accessibility: In this session we'll talk about the importance of accessibility and share tips and tools to make your Power BI reports accessible and user friendly.

We'll cover a range of topics, including:
* Power BI themes - colours, font sizes and external resources to help you learn best practices
* Mobile friendly reports - design for the device as well as the person using Power BI mobile view and app
* Visualization formatting techniques - good practice tips and hidden secrets of visualization formatting that will make your reports easier to read
* Dynamic titles - let users know what they're looking at with simple DAX and conditional formatting

• Intermediate
• Power BI

Advanced Analysis Services

Analysis Services (AS) is the database engine that Power BI Runs on. This session will perform a deep dive into some of the latest/greatest enhancements to the AS engine, along with spending time explaining the all-important storage engine in more detail.

• Expert
• Power BI

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale

Platform as a service (PaaS)
What is Azure SQL?
Azure SQL Database (PaaS)
vCore and DTU purchasing models
vCore model and service tiers options
Service tier characteristics SQL Azure
Hyperscale service tier
What is a Hyperscale database?
Hyperscale service tier architecture
Hyperscale service tier capabilities
Hyperscale service tier limitations
Demo
Q&A

• Intermediate
• Azure

Azure Storage - The ins and outs

Storing data has come a long way over the past decade – from traditional hard disk drives to Solid State drives, cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions to (perceived) complex Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings.
You will likely need to consider things like speed, security, redundancy and how all these components can fit together. You will need to balance these with ease of access for your clients – all of which will have a bearing on cost.
The good news is that there is a lot of choice. While the amount of options available can be over-whelming the flexibility this can give us is considerable. However, some of the questions you might have are
• What belongs to IaaS and what belongs to PaaS?
• What storage option can be used with what compute option?
• What are Availability Sets and Availability Zones?
• What level of redundancy is appropriate?
• Can I access my cloud-based data from my On-Premises application?
• Once I’ve decided on a solution how do I set it up?
Come along to this session and hear about the ins and outs of Azure storage and the options that you will probably want to consider when making a storage decision - whatever data technology you are dealing with.

• Intermediate
• Azure
• Development

Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools Performance Tips and Tricks

Do you often look at the performance of your Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools? Are you trying to improve this performance? If so, then this session is for you.
In this session, I’ll share the recipe for 10 tips and tricks to help you optimize the state of your Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Pools and ensure that your platform is both future-proof and reliable.

• Intermediate
• Data Analytics

Become a Citizen Integrator with Azure Data Factory Power Query

Data engineering is not for business users, that is only for skilled technical users. That is what we all believed until Azure Data Factory Power Query (Data wrangling data flow) came to picture. In this session I will show you how a Power BI user can perform data engineering tasks within ADF using Power Query. Additionally I will explain how different ADF Power Query with Power BI Power Query

• Introductory and overview
• Power BI
• Azure
• Data Analytics

Building and managing an Analytics Platform in Azure

Azure provides flexibility to instantiate services as and when they are needed, so you can change your platform capabilities as your progress. Data can be incredibly varied and there are different patterns for delivering specific analytics requirements, depending on whether you are doing data warehousing for BI, streaming real-time analytics, IoT analytics, AI/ML.

In this session we will build a platform that will allow ingestion of data from various sources and showcase various techniques and processes native to Azure that allows us to manage this platform.

This session is about managing your data platform - so that any data scientist, BI developer or Data Professional can easily build, scale and manage that platform using industry proven techniques.

• Intermediate
• case study
• Azure
• Data Analytics

Business user to Data Scientist: Automated ML, Azure ML designer and Azure Notebook

Azure ML workspace is an end-to-end platform that Business users, developers, and data scientists can use to train the models, test them, evaluate, deploy them, and create continuous delivery products (DevOps). In this session, first, an introduction to Automated Machine learning will be presented. How we can use Azure ML Designer will be shown, and also how to use Azure notebooks will be demonstrated. The Audience will see how to use their own prebuild model from other platforms such as ONNX, Tensorflow, R, PySpark, and so forth, and then apply it to data inside Azure and make it as a pipeline.

• Intermediate
• Azure
• AI
• Machine Learning

Charticulator + DAX = More Insightful Visuals

Charticulator is a tool from Microsoft and is used for creating bespoke data visualisations. It's now available as a visual in Power BI and can massively expand your potential for creativity.

One of these benefits is that we now have a opportunity to leverage Charticulator to apply cosmetic features that previously required us to develop a custom visual, or having to make complicated changes to our data model to achieve more insight from our data viz.

In this session, we will step beyond the basic concepts and provide some some examples of how we can use row context and simpler measures to level-up our visuals for our readers and get to insight faster.

• Intermediate
• Power BI

Data Modelling in Azure Cosmos DB

Modelling your data correctly is vital when building efficient applications that use Azure Cosmos DB. Proper data modelling allows us to easily scale our Cosmos DB resources as our applications grow.

Many developers fall into the trap of thinking that just because Azure Cosmos DB is a NoSQL service, we don't need to spend time modelling our data. Lack of attention to proper data modelling in Azure Cosmos DB can lead to poor performing apps that can't scale and are expensive to run.

In this session, we will cover:
- Why you should model your data correctly for NoSQL databases and how this is different to relational data modelling.
- When you would reference entities in NoSQL vs embedding entities in your documents.
- How partitioning and collections factor in when modelling our data and how we can design our collections accordingly.

By the end of this session, attendees will be empowered with data modelling techniques that they can use to build highly scalable and successfully applications that use Azure Cosmos DB.

• Advanced
• Azure
• Development
• Database Development

Decoding your Data's Customers

As data becomes more important for organizations to unlock opportunities, data professionals are being asked to work more closely with non-technical roles. In this session I will share insights on effective collaboration and recommendations on how you can improve uptake of data and reporting in your organization using some simple design thinking principles, enhanced with an understanding of human behaviour.
After this session you will have steps to deliver higher data uptake across non-technical roles in your organization.
Topics covered
Understanding your audience
Working with a problem statement
Designing with your customers
Implementing with excellence
Measuring your product success

• Introductory and overview
• Data Analytics

Demystifying horror stories on cloud data analytics solutions

You might have heard horror stories when building data analytics solutions in Azure. Projects running overtime, cloud expenses going 500% over budget or solutions that didn’t meet business requirements.
In this session, based on my own experience, I will demystify these stories and help you identify the three main components of the PPT framework. These components must be considered and are not negotiable when starting a cloud journey or new projects.
By using this framework, you will set your company up for success in terms of data analytics solutions Azure projects and others.

• Introductory and overview
• Data Analytics

Feeling overwhelmed, but do not want to exercise? Let’s create you a Virtual Agent.

What do a data analyst, a data scientist, a data engineer, a data consultant, a data steward and even a data futurist have in common? Time, or a shortage of it.
During this 45-minute session, I will introduce you to the world of Microsoft Virtual Agents.
The session will be split into three parts:
• When, and why, you should consider using Microsoft Virtual Agents
• How to combat stakeholder resistance to contacting your bot instead of speaking to you
• Wyoue (We, including you!) are going to make a bot, live.
No exposure to Virtual Agents is necessary for attending and getting value out of this session, although it would be beneficial for attendants to be familiar with Microsoft Teams.
So, whether you want to spend more time:
• with your family
• working on that cool and important project at work
• mastering the dark arts of AI, or
• updating your cats Instagram page
Come along and let us get you started on your Virtual Agent journey!

• Introductory and overview
• case study

Getting Started With A Low Code (Power Platform) Strategy

For organizations to avoid disruption and stay competitive in today's world they need to be constantly transforming, and at greater speed than ever before. Having low code as part of your digital strategy can help organizations remove some of the typical barriers to digital transformation. In this session I discuss how to get started defining a low code strategy based on the Microsoft Power Platform. Drawing from real world experiences I will present a framework that you can use to define a low code strategy for your organization.

• Introductory and overview
• Power BI
• Power Automate
• Power Apps

Getting Started with Dataverse

Is Dataverse a database on sterioids? Why Dataverse not SharePoint lists? What is the difference between Dataverse and Dataverse for teams.
There are many good reasons why Dataverse may be the best option for your next project. From a licensing perspective you are likely to be fully licensed to use it; From a rapid development perspective, it ticks all the boxes with its rich interfaces; and from an extensibility perspective, the sky's the limit.
Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort to lower the entrance barrier to getting started with Dataverse and to increase uptake and it is paying off.
97% of fortune 500 are using the Power Platform with Dataverse, come along to this session to see why you should jump on the innovation wagon like they did.

• Introductory and overview
• Power Automate
• Power Apps
• Database Administration
• Database Development

How to choose your first AI Project in your organization?

Artificial Intelligence is transforming every single industry, but organizations still struggle to find the right projects to implement Artificial Intelligence. In this session you will learn the five attributes that you can use to choose the right AI project in your organization.

We will also look that what is required to set your AI project to succeed and create value for your organization by looking at setting up an AI strategy and team that supports implementation of the AI strategy.

• Intermediate
• AI

•  

Large Scale Data  in Power BI

Reporting on large datasets is common challenge for many organizations. Due to the cost of Analysis Services, many organizations are moving models to Power BI. Still, this is opening new set of limitations, such as reporting speed and limited model size.
In this session we are presenting how cloud analytics and Power BI face large datasets challenges. How composite model with "DirectQuery" and "Import Data" combined in Power BI are providing right answer for large datasets. How to build composite models, setup aggregations and deal with"hot" and "cold" data.

• Advanced
• case study
• Power BI

Let's take a visual approach to DAX

When building Power BI data models and reports, sooner or later we can all expect to encounter DAX expressions that don't return the results we want or expect, whether we wrote them ourselves or they were generated by Power BI behind the scenes.

In this session I will share some techniques which I hope will make your life easier when writing or understanding DAX expressions.

I will use a sample dataset to present some tips on visualizing the calculations performed by the DAX engine, in measures, calculated columns and calculated tables:
- Visualizing filter context.
- Visualizing row context, with nested row contexts!
- Getting some help from Performance Analyzer and DAX Studio.
- Debugging measures in a sample report.

This session is aimed at Power BI developers who may be either just starting out, or some way along their DAX journey, and are keen for some tips to help better understand and write DAX expressions.

• Introductory and overview
• Power BI

Logic Apps Standard - The DevOps experience

Logic Apps Standard just went GA, and with that a whole new development experience is now available to developers, which are now able to locally develop, debug and package a group of logic apps as an application. This experience brings logic app much closer to developers, democratizing even more a very powerful integration tool. One important aspect of the development experience today is the ability to automate the build and deployment of the logic apps

In this session - Wagner Silveira, the Digital Practice Lead at Theta in NZ and Azure MVP - will demonstrate how to implement the CI/CD pipelines for logic apps, thinking about aspects like infrastructure as code x code deployment x parameterization and multiple environments setup.

• Advanced
• Azure
• Development

Migrating from Azure Analysis Services to Premium Per User

I will walk through the different requirements to evaluable when migrating from Azure Analysis Services to Premium Per User with an overview of the details below

• Query performance
• Scalability
• Data Loading
• Incremental Refresh
• Processing of data
• Logging
• Modelling
• Deployments
• Row Level Security
• Costs
• Additional features
Any other features you wish to explore

• Introductory and overview
• Power BI

Power BI - Licensing Options

The tough part of implementing Power BI for an organization is to choose the right licensing option. With so many flavours of Power BI licensing, it soon becomes a very complex decision. In this session I will go through various licensing options and which options best suit which scenarios.

Disclaimer: This session is not in an advisory capacity. Please consider this as a learning session to help you better understand the Power BI licensing options available.

• Intermediate
• Power BI

Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics; Power BI Adoption story

Farmlands successfully implemented Dynamics 365 CE and Finance and Operations, as part of that business transformation reporting needed to be rebuilt in Power BI. Farmlands has had a remarkable Power BI adoption leading to more insight lead conversations, Gareth will talk through what worked and some challenges through this journey.

• Introductory and overview
• case study
• Power BI

Power BI Design Patterns

This session starts with a brief overview of the Power BI modelling, and explanation of star-schema, fact and dimension tables. The session then continues with some sample patterns of diagrams and DAX formulas of the most common patterns such as budget vs actual, or inventory stock on hand, and subscription pattern. Patterns mentioned in this session can be re-used in similar situations with minor changes.

• Advanced
• Power BI

Practical Power BI Development Tips

Through a series of practical demos together we will cover:

* Date & Time - Desktop vs. Report vs. Server - how to make sure it all works
* Power Automate integration with Power BI - ignite the possibilities (feature in preview)
* Parameters - link to input files and usage in Power Query
* Last Refresh Date/Time - integrate Power Query that is timezone aware and works
* Date Filtering - This week, last week, last 2 months - on your custom date table

• Intermediate
• Power BI

Python for SQL Professionals

Are you an SQL Server data professional and aspiring to become a data scientist ?

Then this is the right session for you. In this session I will be going through Python basics using a Jupyter notebook to do Exploratory data analysis

• Intermediate
• Azure
• Machine Learning

Rolling Out Power BI

When you are new to Power BI, it can be complex and confusing to get it into your organization. There's tons to learn like user needs, security, change management, governance and support! In this strategic session we will look at all the things you need consider when rolling out Power BI to your organization,

• Introductory and overview
• Power BI

Snowflake on Microsoft Azure

In this session you will see how Snowflake integrates with components across the Microsoft and Microsoft Azure ecosystem including integration with services such as ADLS/Blob Storage, Data Factory, Event Hubs, Azure AD, Private Networking, Power BI, Power Apps, Azure ML.

We will walk through a reference architecture, and then show some of the integrations in action with a near real time streaming platform using Azure Event Hubs, Snowflake, and Power BI.

• Intermediate
• Power BI
• Azure
• Machine Learning
• Database Development
• Data Analytics

Technology to recycle more and waste less

New Zealand is one of the beautiful places to live in! However mountain of waste is a big concern. It requires technology to help managing, recycling, and landfill waste. In this session we'll explore how different services on Azure comes together to help in this area. A demo based session showcasing implementation of a real world project. We'll cover IoT, Data, Devops, Visualization and ML.

• Intermediate
• Power BI
• Azure
• AI
• Development

The beginner's guide for DAX to SQL Developers

If you are coming from SQL background, sometimes you might be struggling to start using DAX as DAX works very differently than SQL. However, If you understand the basic concepts of DAX and how DAX is different from SQL, it will be a good starting point to learn DAX. In this session, I will walk you through how DAX works, main concepts of DAX, comparison between main SQL functions with DAX functions and how you should change your thinking pattern when you write DAX queries if you are coming from SQL world.

• Introductory and overview
• Power BI

The Case for the Defence

SQL Server provides a number of in-built features that can help you to better secure your data and also provide insights on who and what applications are accessing that data.

This starts from the basics of Database Permissions, and extends this with:
* Row-level Security
* Data Masking
* Data Classification
* Encryption
* Auditing

Each of these on their own can provide added assurance about the safety of your data, but in combination they are a very powerful defensive arsenal.

In this session, I will introduce each of the features. We will look at how they work; their individual strengths and weaknesses; how to enable and configure them; and how to use them in your database and applications for maximum peace of mind.

• Advanced
• SQL Server
• Database Administration
• Database Development

Using C# to implement dynamic partitioning in AAS and to extend Synapse Analytics Pipelines

Cloud technologies have provided many benefits to Data Warehouses. In order to extend and leverage some of these benefits we need to interact with the APIs of these services. This session will do a deep dive into Azure Analysis Services and demonstrate how to implement dynamic partitioning using the Azure Analysis Services API. An approach to extending Azure Synapse Analytics Pipelines and triggering these pipelines programmatically will also be demonstrated.

• Advanced
• Development

Why doesn't the business trust IT?

Every year we see surveys of the most trusted professionals. Firefighters are usually top of the list. Have you ever noticed Information Technology roles never make the list?

In this talk Steve will explorer why business may not trust the Information Technology team as much as we think, how building better relationships is beneficial for all and how to bridge the mutual understanding gap.

Price:

 

Register: Difinity Conference 2022 New Zealand