• More Frogs join the FrogPlex!

    July 5th, 2018 in News

    June has been a very busy month for us at the FrogPlex – Firstly Lukasz joined the team, to help work on our clients’ business intelligence projects, and also to expand our Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics capability. In his first month he’s already been tackling projects in SSIS, Data Lake Analytics, building customer churn models in R, as well as providing support to our existing customers. A very warm welcome to the…

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  • Lookups and If Conditions in Azure Data Factory v2 (ADFv2)

    June 5th, 2018 in Azure, Blog, Data Factory, SSIS

    Azure Data Factory v2 (ADFv2) has some significant improvements over v1, and we now consider ADF as a viable platform for most of our cloud based projects. But things aren’t always as straightforward as they could be. I’m sure this will improve over time, but don’t let that stop you from getting started now. This post provides a walk through of using the ‘Lookup’ and ‘If Condition’ activities to do some…

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  • SQLBits 2017 – Several Shades of Purple

    March 22nd, 2017 in News

    This year Purple Frog Systems are getting involved in SQLBits more than ever before! With Europe’s biggest Microsoft data platform conference being hosted in our home town of Telford we had to set the frogs free and add our special shade of amphibious purple to the 2017 event. We’re part of the event organising committee. We’re official event sponsors. We’re official conference helpers. We’re speaking in sessions. We’re recruiting.…

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  • Sampling data in Data Lake U-SQL for Power BI

    January 26th, 2017 in Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, Cloud, Data Lake, Power BI

    Being 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…

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  • Showing December to December to see opening values for a year in SSAS/MDX

    December 12th, 2016 in Analysis Services, Blog

    I 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…

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  • SQL Server 2016 Licensing Changes, SP1, v.Next CTP1, etc.

    November 16th, 2016 in Blog, SQL Server

    By 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…

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  • SQL Saturday 543 Sponsorship in Manchester

    July 25th, 2016 in News

    On 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…

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  • SQL Saturday Manchester Sponsorship

    July 25th, 2016 in News

    We’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

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  • STEM – Weston Road Academy SQL Server Introduction

    July 11th, 2016 in News

    As 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…

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  • What is U-SQL?

    February 18th, 2016 in Big Data, Blog, Cloud

    By 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…

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