• Part 2: Using the Companies House API

    Part 2: Using the companies house API, by CallumJune 26th, 2026 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Jupyter, Python

    Part 2: Using the Companies House API Welcome back following part 1… Getting a list of companies via Python – Advanced Filtering. This example will look at the transport sector, leveraging the SIC codes in companies house. This can be altered accordingly to suit the business nature you are looking for. The libraries allows you to do more with Python, in this example that will included API calls, referencing the current date time and…

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  • Part 1: Using the Companies House API

    : A person wearing a Purple Frog-branded polo shirt stands with arms crossed in front of a modern curved glass building. The background features a purple geometric design with hexagons and circular tech-style graphics. Text on the right reads: ‘Part 1: Using the companies house API.’February 13th, 2026 in Blog, Business Intelligence, CSV, Data analytics, Export, Fabric, Jupyter, Python, Visual Studio

    The .gov website hosts companies house and the companies house API. This is a comprehensive list of businesses across the UK, new and old, big and small, and their filings and info. You can interact with this information via code such as Python. The following blog post series will show you how to perform an advanced search of companies – using multiple different filters to get specific businesses – and then looping through these results to…

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  • Fill Blank Rows With Previous Non-Blank Values – DAX

    Fill Blank Rows With Previous Non-Blank Values - DAXSeptember 5th, 2025 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Dashboarding and Reporting, DAX, Power BI, PowerBI

    Fill Blank Rows With Previous Non-Blank Values – DAX I want to see a value for everyday, whether a new value exists or not – lets call it tracking the members of a golf club. If there are no changes to the member numbers, I would have no movement figure on that day. If someone joined or left, the figure would be updated. Just because there are no changes, it doesn’t mean that there are no members on that date and therefore this day is…

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  • BLANK() Function Not Working As Expected

    May 1st, 2025 in Blog, DAX, Power BI

    Trying to handle blank values in Power BI… I needed a measure that would fill blank gaps across days where a value wasn’t present – I thought the BLANK() function would help me achieve this. My goal for the results of the measure is shown below: The logic is quite simple, if the value on that day is not blank, take that value. If it is blank then take the previous non-blank value. The first piece of logic is to get the date where…

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  • PowerShell – Extract zipped folders and delete original .zip

    PowerShell – Extract zipped folders and delete original .zipNovember 22nd, 2024 in Blog, CSV, PowerShell, Purple Frog Systems

    It may be of use to extract .zip folders quickly and effectively, particular in large volumes. Rather than going through manually, one by one clicking extract here for each folder, waiting, then finding the next folder to unzip, do this via PowerShell instead. The scenario we have faced is archiving source files. Instead of having 15,000 files in a folder for March, they are contained in a .zip folder called 202403.zip – its much cleaner.…

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  • Power BI Dataset Gives Mashup Timeout Error While Refreshing

    July 26th, 2024 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Power BI, PowerBI, SQL, SQL Server, Uncategorised

    Help – my Power BI dataset is giving mashup timeout error on refresh The mashup timeout error Incremental refreshes are a great benefit to have in order to reduce refresh times – but not when they give a mashup timeout error. Although they are meant to be a performance enhancement, they aren’t always the best approach as they fire parallel queries to the source and apply date time filters. Despite the default timeout being 2 hours, or 5…

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  • Using Stored Procedure as a Power BI Source (with parameters)

    April 9th, 2024 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, PowerBI, SQL, SQL Server

    Using a SQL Server stored procedure as a source in Power BI We might be most familiar with using a view as the source to our PBI datasets, a series of views creating a series of tables. This can be great but when handling more complex view queries with lookups, you might find yourself with a severely long refresh and even an error. This is where a stored procedure is required – this gives you more control layer by layer in the source query.…

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  • TRY_CAST Arithmetic Overflow Error

    March 7th, 2024 in Blog, SQL, SQL Server

    TRY_CAST() Arithmetic Overflow Error – How? It is expected that at some point you will receive some bad data – such as the wrong range, form or data type. Sometimes you receive valid data but the result of a calculation is when it goes wrong, a simple multiplication takes your data from good to bad, the difference between your cube processing and not processing, the difference between your clients receiving vital data and not receiving…

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  • Synapse Script Activity Error “Argument {0} is null or empty.\r\nParameter name: paraKey”

    November 1st, 2023 in Activity Error, ADFv2, Azure, Blog, Data Factory, SQL, Synapse, Uncategorised

    Came across this issue when trying to get a range of values that are calculated dynamically at runtime. Using the script activity in ADF, I wanted a result set that I could reference as parameters for a notebook later in the pipeline but was experiencing an error I had not seen before referencing null arguments. The Problem The script is simple – get a few key dates from the last few months and set these as variables. Finally, return these…

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  • Synapse Copy Activity Fails Over Certain File Size – ADF

    July 21st, 2023 in Azure, Blog, CSV, Data Factory, Data Lake, Synapse

    Copy Activity Issue in ADF / Synapse Analytics Recently, when trying to copy a .csv file from an FTP source to a Azure Data Lake using a Copy Activity in Azure Synapse, I had an issue where files > 16MB in size would fail. To overcome this, I took the first 13k rows and created another file from this, which resulted in a 4MB file. I tested this extra small file and it worked in the copy activity no issues. I multiplied these same 13k rows out…

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