Sampling data in Data Lake U-SQL for Power BI
January 26th, 2017 in Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, Cloud, Data Lake, Power BIBeing able to hook Power BI directly into Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) is a very powerful tool (and it will be even more so when you can link to ADLS files that are in a different Azure account!! – not yet available as at January 2017). However there is a problem, Data Lake is designed to scale to petabytes of data whereas Power BI has a 10GB limit. Yes this is compressed, so we’d expect around 100GB of raw data, however to load…
» Read moreShowing December to December to see opening values for a year in SSAS/MDX
December 12th, 2016 in Analysis Services, BlogI came across an interesting MDX challenge this week; within a cube’s Date dimension, how to show December twice, once where it should be and again as the opening value for the following year. i.e. for each year I need to show Dec (prev yr), Jan, …, Nov, Dec. Why? Well if you consider the following pivot chart, you can clearly see growth from Jan to Feb, Feb to Mar, etc., but it’s very difficult to see the growth between Dec…
» Read moreSQL Server 2016 Licensing Changes, SP1, v.Next CTP1, etc.
November 16th, 2016 in Blog, SQL ServerBy now you’ve probably heard the exciting news announced at today’s Microsoft Connect conference; SQL Server licensing is changing, significantly, from SQL 2016 SP1. The functionality of SQL Server Standard, Web & Express editions are being brought up to [almost, 99%] match that of Enterprise Edition. This has a number of critical impacts: Developers can write applications using a single set of SQL Server functionality, and can…
» Read moreSQL Saturday 543 Sponsorship in Manchester
July 25th, 2016 in NewsOn Saturday 22nd July Purple Frog Systems were the proud sponsors of SQL Saturday 543 held in Manchester. The day started with the key note from Microsoft’s Andrew Fryer on the middle floor of the venue, seen below. Then the Purple Frog team were out in force with Alex Whittles speaking in two sessions; A Drive Into SSIS and An Introduction to U-SQL. Paul Andrew was manning the sponsor stand with an excellent IoT real-time data…
» Read moreSQL Saturday Manchester Sponsorship
July 25th, 2016 in NewsWe’re delighted to be partnering with the next SQL Saturday event in Manchester on 25th July 2015. As a Gold partner, we’ll be there for the duration, and look forward to meeting you there. For more information, take a look at their website: click here
» Read moreSTEM – Weston Road Academy SQL Server Introduction
July 11th, 2016 in NewsAs part of the STEM ambassador programme on Friday 8th July Purple Frog’s Paul Andrew went along to Weston Road Academy in Stafford to teach the Year 10 ICT class basic T-SQL syntax using the latest Microsoft SQL Server 2016 technology. Due to limitations on the local school network we weren’t able to get SQL Server Express installed. This presented the perfect opportunity to use the power and elasticity of the Microsoft Azure cloud by…
» Read moreWhat is U-SQL?
February 18th, 2016 in Big Data, Blog, CloudBy now you may have heard about U-SQL, the new kid on the query language block. But what is U-SQL? Where is it? What’s it for? I was lucky enough to be at the 2015 MVP Summit in Redmond, at which one of the sessions was hosted by Michael Rys (@MikeDoesBigData), talking about U-SQL. As it’s creator, there’s no-one better to learn the ropes from. I was pretty much blown away by what it can do and the ease of access, so I’ve…
» Read morePASS Summit and MVP Summit 2015
November 7th, 2015 in Blog, CommunityI’m currently sitting in Seattle-Tacoma airport waiting for BA048 to take me home, and coming to terms with what an amazing couple of weeks I’ve been fortunate to have. The PASS Summit I had the honour of being selected to speak at the PASS Summit last week, the biggest SQL Server conference in the World, with I believe in the region of 5,500 attendees. I’ve been a regular speaker at lots of the European events (SQL Bits, SQL…
» Read moreMDX Compare or Rank Similar Members
August 13th, 2015 in Analysis Services, BlogOr should this be called: “Recreating DAX’s EARLIER function in MDX” – either way, a useful technique that solves a problem… MDX makes it very easy for us to compare one member against others, using functions such as RANK() etc. But how do we dynamically compare a member against a subset of other members? I came across a customer requirement recently where we had to rank a member against other members that had…
» Read moreExcel crashes when enabling macros
June 7th, 2015 in Blog, OtherI’ve had a problem with Excel 2013 crashing a number of times when opening/editing spreadsheets with macros. When I click ‘Enable Content’ to enable macros, the Excel window fades out, goes unresponsive and then crashes with a glorious “Microsoft Excel has stopped working, Windows is checking for a solution to the problem” message. Unfortunately Windows never seems to be able to find the elusive solution that we…
» Read more
Call today 0845 643 6463
