• Excel, CSV and Leading Zeros

    March 3rd, 2023 in Blog, Excel

    Yes, even at Purple Frog Systems we use Excel! Excel is great for that quick and dirty analysis, but there is nothing worse than opening a CSV file directly with Excel and finding out you’ve lost all of your leading zeros. Take a look at my Sales.csv file Viewed as a CSV in Notepad++ it looks as it should… However viewed directly using Excel… It now looks like I’ve got a sales quantity of 62 for product id 5! To solve…

    » Read more

  • Azure Data Factory Pricing – How much is my pipeline actually costing me?

    December 1st, 2022 in ADFv2, Azure, Blog, Data Factory

    Has a client ever asked you how much it actually costs to run a single pipeline in Azure Data Factory? Have you ever thought ADF pricing is just a black box? Well, hopefully my latest blog post will give you an indication on how you can start calculating the cost of a pipeline run! I will base my analysis on a sample pipeline containing the following activities as shown below: 1 x Lookup Activity (Pipeline Activity) 1 x Copy Data Activity (Data…

    » Read more

  • Previous Row Value DAX

    October 18th, 2022 in Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI

    In this quick blog post I’m going to show you how to use a hidden DAX function to get a previous row value with just a few lines of code. It’s that hidden that intellisense doesn’t even recognise it! I’ll use an example of some fictional race results from some well-known cartoon characters! Lets assume that in this scenario we wanted to analyse the time difference between 1st and 2nd place, 2nd and 3rd place etc in the race scenario…

    » Read more

  • How to Trigger a Power BI Dataset Refresh via Azure Synapse Analytics in 3 Simple Steps.

    June 27th, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Synapse

    In this blog post we’ll explore how to trigger a Power BI Dataset via Azure Synapse Analytics in 3 simple steps: Step 1: Create a new security group called “AzureSynapsePowerBIIntegration” in your Azure Active Directory. Next add the name of your Azure Synapse Workspace as a member of your new security group. This will be your service principal. Step 2: Login to powerbi.com and in the top right hand corner locate “Settings” and…

    » Read more

  • How to parameterise the Execute Pipeline activity in Azure Synapse Analytics.

    April 12th, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Data Factory, Synapse, Uncategorized

    Unfortunately, as of April 2022 there is not an option to parameterise or add dynamic content to an “Execute Pipeline” activity to invoke a pipeline run. However, with the use of a Microsoft API there is method which we can use to overcome this. In this blog post we’ll use the “Pipeline – Create Pipeline Run” API documented below: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/synapse/data-plane/pipeline/create-pipeline-run…

    » Read more

  • How to resolve SSIS “Row yielded no match during lookup” error.

    January 26th, 2022 in Blog, Business Intelligence, SSIS

    Have you ever been faced with the SSIS error “Row yielded no match during lookup”? If so, this blog is for you! A customer of ours recently faced the same issue in one of their SSIS packages and asked us to investigate this for them. Initial investigations on their side highlighted that when they replicated the lookup component using a standard join in T-SQL (similar to the image below) it returned the expected results. So why was SSIS…

    » Read more

  • Replicating SQL windowing functions in Power Query.

    October 1st, 2021 in Blog, Power BI, Power Query

    I’m sure you’ve all heard of windowing functions in SQL Server? But what if you need to replicate these windowing functions in Power Query? Here I have a sample CarSales.csv dataset of car sales per brand, per year, per month and the number of units sold. I will use this dataset to demonstrate how we can replicate the windowing LAG function in Power Query. In my example I’d like to calculate the month on month sales growth per car…

    » Read more

  • How to change the summarization of multiple columns in Power BI.

    August 17th, 2021 in Blog, Power BI

    Have you ever been faced with the issue where Power BI automatically adds a sigma symbol to the front of your column if it detects it’s a data type of integer or decimal? Now this isn’t too much of an issue if you’ve imported only a few columns but what if you’ve imported lots? Going through this column by column can become tiresome! Luckily there is a hack, not only to turn summarization to “None” on multiple columns at once, but…

    » Read more

  • How to export more than 30,000 rows of data from Power BI Desktop.

    June 21st, 2021 in Blog, DAX, Power BI

    Have you ever wanted to export a table from Power BI Desktop into Excel just to make sure the DAX you’ve written is performing as expected but ran into this error message: “Data exceeds the limit – Your data is too large. Some data sampling may occur”? Most probably this has occurred because you’ve got more than 30,000 rows of data in your table that you’re trying to export. In the example shown below I’ve actually got 30,001 rows…

    » Read more

  • How to make your matrix column widths all equal to each other in Power BI using DAX.

    April 9th, 2021 in Blog, Power BI, Uncategorized

    Have you ever come across an issue where your Power BI matrix column widths just aren’t the same width and visually just don’t look right? Unfortunately (as of April 21’) there is no easy way to make all column widths equal in the format pane of a matrix visual. However there is a hack to set the width of your all columns in a matrix so that they are all equal and pixel perfect with DAX! How do you do this I hear you ask? Firstly create a…

    » Read more