Entelect Represents with Four Speakers at Data Saturday 2023
5 August 2023, was an exciting day for the Entelect Data Solutions Practice. After a hiatus of 3 years, Data Saturday (previously known as SQL Saturday) took place again at Microsoft's offices in Bryanston. It is a free, full-day, volunteer-led, in-person event that covers a variety of topics within the Microsoft data platform ecosystem. A great opportunity to interact with our fellow data professionals to network, and discuss challenges and solutions to some of their most pressing problems.
Armed with a suitcase full of Entelect swag and two Entelect banners we knew that this day would be a good one. Janine Lodewick, Anil Lackhoo, Christiaan Koch, Johan van Greunen and Kevin Gray were there to ensure we were flying the Entelect flag high.
Once our stand was set up we knew it was going to be a busy day, not only because of the Entelect swag being in high demand, but because of our smarties challenge - we had a jar filled with 3,427 smarties and got people to guess the right number (although it might have been 3,425 since a reliable source told me she couldn't control herself anymore when I wasn't looking ????). The lucky person that came closest with their guess walked away with a supply that should last a good couple of months (or weeks for chocoholics). We also had a Power BI report on the live survey data for the prize giving.
After the keynote, Christiaan Koch was first up with his talk about automating Power BI deployments using Azure DevOps and the Power BI REST API. Immediately after that, Janine Lodewick took to the stage with her talk 'Could I store data in my closet?', where she delved into the last 4 decades of key data analytics concepts from data warehousing to big data to the cloud, ultimately to the current data mesh topics that dominate many architecture discussions. Anil Lackhoo was up with the last session before the lunch break, discussing his first impressions of Power BI Data marts. He had his audience captivated from start to finish. Johan van Greunen with his amazing talk about ingesting reliable data into an Azure Data Lake using DataOps concepts concluded the afternoon. All speakers performed so well on stage and fielded a lot of great questions at the end of each session. For some, it was their first time presenting in person in front of a relatively large audience!
After the close-out and prize-giving (I have to admit, it was hard to part ways with the jar of Smarties after having bonded with it for the whole day…) we all left feeling stoked about the day. Onto the next one!