
Craig Porteous
Husband, Dad | Data Platform MVP | Principal Advanced Analytics Consultant | DATA:Scotland event founder | Glasgow Data UG organiser | He/Him.
Glasgow, United Kingdom
I bring data and automation together. I love to learn and share what I learn with the technical community. I enjoy running and live for my family. He/Him
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Area of Expertise
Topics
Building a Lakehouse on the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
The Data Lakehouse - it's an emerging architecture being driven by the spark community, but it has a real place within the Microsoft ecosystem. But where do you start? What makes it different? How does it work within Synapse Analytics specifically?
This 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. Finally, we'll draw out our whole data architecture, understanding how the Lakehouse serves our whole data community.
Why the Lakehouse?
Everyone's talking about data Lakehouses but what is a Lakehouse other than a nice place to go fishing? Why do you need to know about the lakehouse architecture, whats the benefits and is it all just hype?
In this session I'll cover what the Data Lakehouse architecture is, where it fits against existing architectures like a data warehouse, and why you should build one. We'll also cover the underlying technology options to arm you with all of the information you need to plan your next data platform.
Designing Data Architectures that InfoSec will actually approve
Building your data platform in the cloud is easy, but as soon as that dreaded word "security" becomes involved it suddenly becomes incredibly painful. How do you go about integrating it with your existing networking, how do you manage user security, what on earth is a private endpoint? Over the past year, a lot of these tools have evolved and we now have a set of mature patterns we can apply to actually make a modern data platform secure.
In this session I'll guide you from through a secure reference architecture with Data Factory, Databricks, Data Lake, and Azure Synapse, working together as a secure, fully productionised platform. Each has their own idiosyncrasies, but this session will teach you the options available and the pitfalls to avoid.
Accessibility for hard of hearing & deaf people
This session gives you an insight on what you can do in order to be more accessible to people that are hard of hearing or deaf. Accessibility does matter because it means that you are able to broad your audience and believe it or not it also supports people without disabilities.
"Cultivating the Catalogue" - Growing Data Governance with Azure Purview
Providing a business with an organized and propagated data catalogue is essential with ever growing demands and questions about your data platform. How are your data assets organised and how can you track lineage?
In this session we will help you sew the seeds of good data governance and show how Azure Purview fits into your pathway. We will demonstrate how processes, business terminology, and ownership drive data governance forward. To close out this introductory session we'll dig deep into ways to extend Purview's capability with the Atlas API
Chocolatey for Data People
The Why and How of using chocolatey to save you time setting up your machine
Lightning talk
Build a perfectly governed Data Lake with Azure Purview
How do you stop a data lake turning into a data swamp? How do you make the data usable and accessible? I'll explore the foundations for good data lake architecture and how Azure Purview is the key to adoption and governance
Surveying your estate: Managing a sprawling data landscape with Azure Purview
In this session I will discuss the importance of data governance in a modern analytics organisation, and how Azure Purview fits into that journey. You will leave this session with an understanding of what Azure Purview is, and what is important for good data governance.
The PowerShell Standards Agency – Write better code for Everybody
There’s the quick way or there’s the right way. In this session we will look at good practices and standards to follow when writing PowerShell to make it easier for you and others to trust and reuse your code
By the end of this session you’ll have a guide to being a better PowerShell citizen, following best practices and sharing your code with others.
Become a member of the PowerShell Standards Agency* (Not a real thing) and write better code for Everybody
Supercharge your Reporting Services: An essential toolkit
Get the most out of your Reporting Services (SSRS) environments with this arsenal of PowerShell, SQL and admin tools. You'll leave this session knowing and controlling more about your SSRS environments than you thought possible.
Get the most out of your Reporting Services (SSRS) environments with this arsenal of PowerShell, SQL and admin tools. You'll leave this session knowing and controlling more about your SSRS environments than you thought possible covering monitoring, security, administration and deployment.
Adventures in CICD with Azure Synapse
In this session we'll look at the pitfalls, prerequisites, and process of setting up a continuous deployment pipeline for your Azure Synapse workspace. In this demo-heavy session we'll set up a YAML pipeline using Azure DevOps to deploy an Azure Synapse workspace resources through a development lifecycle.
Data Saturday Denmark - 2023
Data Relay 2022
Birmingham Data Platform - JUNE ONLINE EVENT - SSRS, PowerApps and PowerBI
Supercharge your Reporting Services: An essential toolkit
Swedish Power BI User Group May meetup
Power BI Under Source Control
Guildford - Surrey Data Platform Group
3 ways to bring Power BI under Source Control
SQLBits 2019
Power BI and PowerShell - A Match Made in Heaven
PowerShell Southampton
The PowerShell Standards Agency – Write better code for Everybody
SQL Relay 2018
Power BI and PowerShell - A Match Made in Heaven
SQL Relay 2018
Power BI and PowerShell - A Match Made in Heaven
Dev Ops North East
The PowerShell Standards Agency – Write better code for Everybody
Austin PowerShell User Group
Remote Session: The PowerShell Standards Agency – Write better code for Everybody
Cardiff MSFT Stack User Group
The PowerShell Standards Agency – Write better code for Everybody
Power BI and PowerShell - A Match Made in Heaven

Craig Porteous
Husband, Dad | Data Platform MVP | Principal Advanced Analytics Consultant | DATA:Scotland event founder | Glasgow Data UG organiser | He/Him.
Glasgow, United Kingdom