• My Broken Query Runs Successfully in Synapse, Not That I’m Complaining, But How?

    My Broken Query Runs Successfully in Synapse, Not That I'm Complaining, But How?May 14th, 2026 in Blog, SQL, SQL Server, Synapse

    I had one of those moments this week, I spent too long trying to figure out how something that I knew was broken, was running fine and throwing no errors. Can it be called troubleshooting if it isn’t causing trouble? I have a Synapse pipeline that’s been running just fine for months, due to some migration work, I needed to take a look at the source query and found it was broken. I had it open in SSMS on the other monitor, ran it,…

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  • Is ETL now a Circular Process?

    December 24th, 2025 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Data analytics, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, PowerBI

    Traditionally, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) has been a one-way journey. Data is extracted from operational systems, it’s transformed into a clean, structured format and then it’s loaded into a data store (typically a warehouse or lakehouse), rinse and repeat. But what’s after that? Business users build reports and dashboards and make a decisions from their insights, but the data itself never flows back into the systems where the work…

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  • Why DuckDB Is the Data Engineer’s New Secret Weapon

    August 6th, 2025 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Python, SQL, Uncategorised

          Most databases need a server. DuckDB doesn’t. It’s a zero‑config, in‑process OLAP database you can run directly using Python. It’s fast, SQL‑friendly, and speaks Parquet like a native language — no clusters, no heavyweight setup, no waiting for provisioning. Think of DuckDB as SQLite for analytics — but faster, more column‑aware, and built for modern data engineering.   What Makes DuckDB Special DuckDB…

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  • Stop Pressing Publish in Power BI – OneDrive or Sharepoint can do that for you

    March 12th, 2025 in Blog, Power BI, Purple Frog Systems

    If you’re still using the Publish button in Power BI Desktop, there’s a better and more efficient way to manage your reports while saving time. By leveraging OneDrive and SharePoint integration, you can speed up your workflow, reduce errors, and improve collaboration. Here’s how you can do it: Step 1: Enable Save to OneDrive and SharePoint Preview Features First, ensure that your Power BI Desktop is set up correctly: Open Power BI Desktop.…

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  • FabCon Europe from a Community Point-of-View

    October 2nd, 2024 in Blog, Community, Fabric, Uncategorised

    A community hub at a data conference serves as a vital central point for building connections, collaboration, and innovation among attendees. The Community Lounge at FabCon Europe in Stockholm was a great example of this. It was a hive of activity across the entire event. Microsoft’s community staff, MVPs, volunteers and members all came together to provide an entertaining way to network and ensure the right people are signed up to the right…

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  • Ownership Made Easy: Microsoft Fabric Warehouse Takeovers

    June 19th, 2024 in Blog, Data Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Fabric

    Fabric Warehouse Ownership Takeover As part of your project you have created and developed a Fabric Warehouse and now it is time to transfer the ownership of it away from your account to a production Service Principal Name or someone else in the organisation to maintain. There’s no simple method in the GUI so how do you do it? You use the Takeover API. Let’s go through the process step-by-step but beware, there is one caveat, you MUST…

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  • The Power of Contribution: Why Creating Content Matters in the Data Community

    The Power of Contribution Why Creating Content Matters in the Data CommunityFebruary 7th, 2024 in Blog, Community, Other

    Many people, including me up until a year or so ago, believe that between the documentation, videos, blog posts and experts delivering sessions on specific tech, that there is no room or necessity for them to create content or teach. This is simply not the case! So, in a world seemingly saturated with learning material, why should you bother creating more? Different Perspectives How often have you read a blog post, not really understood it, read…

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  • Power BI Table Totals Not Adding Up? Here’s Why!

    Power BI Table Totals Not Adding Up? Here's Why!October 4th, 2023 in Blog, DAX, PowerBI, Uncategorised

    Ever built a table containing measures in Power BI, done a quick sanity check on your table totals and noticed they’re incorrect? Let’s explore why this may be. Here we have a simple table, built from data in the AdventureWorks database. It shows the three product categories, the Total Sales and Average Order Total of each category: As you can see, the Total Sales column adds up perfectly, but the average is just plain wrong. 19.42 +…

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  • Why Are There Gaps in the Identity Column in My SQL Database?

    May 17th, 2023 in Blog

    All too often there are questions asked about missing records that are identified by gaps in the identity column of a table. If a table, ordered by the identity column, shows “1, 2, 3, 5”, record 4 must have been deleted right? Well, although that is a possibility, it’s not a safe assumption as there are other causes of these “missing” IDs. Let’s start with a simple table, it only has 3 columns, the first of which being an…

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  • #This vs @That – Should I use a Table Variable or a Temporary Table?

    April 17th, 2023 in Blog, SQL Server

    When working with SQL Server, it’s not uncommon to need to store data in a temporary table or table variable. While both options can be used to accomplish the same goal, there are differences between the two that can affect performance and the ability to write efficient code. Let’s explore the differences between table variables and temporary tables, and when to use each one. @Table Variables Table variables are declared using the…

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