Top Three Sessions from Data Platform Summit 2018

If you are regular follower of my blog, you must be aware that recently I got an opportunity to attend the Data Platform Summit (On Microsoft Data Stack) which was held in between 9^th to 11^th Aug. 2018, at Hotel Radisson Blue, Bangalore. Overall the #DPS summit was very good and I able to cover some of the sessions during the three days. For more detail about the summit you can follow my other post.

Image: The main auditorium.

Image: Rohan Kumar (Corporate VP, Microsoft Azure Data) Keynote Speech.

Image: Myself near the summit entry point.

Now let’s come to the point. Since there are multiple sessions in three days, I would like to discuss the top three sessions on this summit which I have attended, since I am an infrastructure architect but I have not followed only the infrastructure related sessions, from overall stand point I would like to rank the top three sessions, and they are follows.
Session Rank 1: Deep Dive into Azure SQL Database Managed Instance

This session is really one of the best session which talks about the new SQL Server Managed instances. The session has been taken by Ajay Jagannathan, The SQL Managed instances is something which is going to change the SQL server world in next few months. There are many features which will make a clear cut advantage point why you should move your SQL instances to SQL Server Azure managed instances. I have published a detail blog post about the SQL Server Managed Instances in my last post. This blog post is inspired by this session largely.

Session Rank 2: Machine Learning is not magic – Getting Started with Azure ML

This is one of the very good session where Jankiram MSV has beautifully explained one of the basic experiment for the Machine Learning, the session explain in detail on how to get started in machine learning, using familiar tools such as Excel, Python, Jupyter Notebooks and machine learning cloud services (Machine Learning Studio) from Azure.

Image: Jankiraman explaining in the session.

Jankiraman has written a detail blog about his work in Machine Learning in a series of blog post here.

Session Rank 3: Deep Neural Networks – Let us build an Image/Currency Classifier

This is again another great session on Advanced Machine Learning and Neural Networks. The session has been delivered by Sandeep Alur, since machine learning has been gaining momentum over last decade: self-driving cars, efficient web search, speech and image recognition are the key advancement. This session based on image recognition where he has used 2000 images of currency to identify a 500/2000 rupees currency note. It’s really an interesting session and I love this one.

Image: Sandeep Alur explaining his experiment.

One of the sessions on Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Databricks: Integration for the Modern Data Warehouse taken by Casey Karst was also excellent.
Overall the data platform summit was good. I think this must be bigger than the Microsoft Cloud Roadshow we attended in 2016. People who have attended the sessions, I am sure have definitely gained lots of knowledge from the experts around the world. Kudos to #DPS team.