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Monday Oct. 12, 2020, 5:15 p.m.–Oct. 12, 2020, 5:30 p.m. in Jupyter Community: Practices

What we learned from introducing Jupyter Notebooks to the SQL community

Alan Yu, Chris LaFreniere

Audience level:
Novice

Brief Summary

When we first supported notebooks, we targeted data scientists. But what would happen if the SQL community were introduced to notebooks? We embarked on a 2 year journey with thousands of SQL users who have never touched a notebook and watched them incorporate notebooks into their daily lives. We will share our story of listening and embracing open source to make notebooks lovable for SQL users.

Outline

Objective: To share learnings from introducing notebooks to a new customer segment while embracing open source and user feedback along the way.

Outline: - Share why we supported notebooks in Azure Data Studio - How we brought notebooks to the SQL community - User research studies - Share technical implementation for features introduced and why: - Building SQL kernel - Integrating Jupyter Books for troubleshooting - Improving first time experiences - Supporting notebook-assisted deployments - Implementing Jupyter-compatible kernels - Takeaways from working with open source community and introducing notebooks to new users

Thesis: Notebooks are a lovable experience for more than just data scientists, and we can do more by working together with the open source community to introduce notebooks to new categories of users and empower them.

Key Takeaways: - Embrace open source rather than reinventing the wheel. - Be creative with incorporating notebooks into users' daily workflows. - Listen, listen, listen. That is how you can bring users on the journey together.

Required Background Knowledge: - Basic knowledge of Jupyter notebooks

Relevant links: - Azure Data Studio notebooks overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt4kIHQ0IOc - Notebooks documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/sql/azure-data-studio/notebooks-guidance?view=sql-server-ver15