Simon Whiteley

Your users have been building apps for years: the spreadsheet that secretly runs your entire finance division, the cryptic Power App POC that quietly became production. Every attempt to stop them has failed, because the need was always real and the alternative was static dashboards.

Discover how AI transforms data engineering by automating repetitive tasks, generating schemas, ensuring data quality, and answering business questions. Come along to explore practical tools, accelerate workflows, and glimpse the future of AI-driven automation.

Seasoned Data Engineer and YouTube grumbler Simon Whiteley takes us on a journey through the current industry trends and buzzwords, carving through the hype to get at the underlying ideals. Which is going to last and which is a sales gimmick? Which bandwagon might actually take you in the right...

If you're using Spark in a production environment, you've likely already discovered Delta, one of the leading next-generation file formats. But is that all there is to it?

In this session, seasoned data engineer and youtube grumbler Simon Whiteley takes us on a journey through the current industry trends and buzzwords, carving through the hype to get at the underlying ideals.

This session session aims to give you that context. We'll look at how spark-based engines work and how we can use them within Synapse Analytics. We'll dig into Delta, the underlying file format that enables the Lakehouse, and take a tour of how the Synapse compute engines interact with it....

In this training session you will build a full fletched green field Lakehouse architecture based on best practices! You will be guided by experts in the field to learn about the key components & how to build it in the most dynamic & performant way!

Azure Synapse Analytics has been steadily maturing and growing since it's release, but it's still hard to know where to start! This introductory training session will give you a grounding in all of the Synapse engines so you'll know your Spark Pool from your SQL Pools and be ready to hit the...

Databricks, Lakes & Parquet are a match made in heaven, but explode with extra power when using Delta Lake. This session will dive into the details of how Databricks Delta works and how to make the most of it.

Azure now has two slick, platform-as-a-service spark offerings, but which one should you choose? A separate specialist tools or a one-size-fits-all solution? Join Simon as he compares and contrasts the spark offerings.

Ever spent an age releasing a data model, only to find no-one uses it? There's a better way of working, driven by both technology & agile working practices, let me tell you about Value Driven Development & DataOps

Azure DataBricks can be used for both engineering and for data science. This session is led by two Microsoft MVPs, facing off. Engineer vs Scientist. The session is half how to build data pipelines and half how to do machine learning at scale.

Azure DataBricks is a PaaS offering of Apache Spark, which allows for blazing fast data processing! How can data engineers harness the in-memory processing power? Azure DataBricks can be your data ingestion, transformation and curation tool of choice