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  • Why should you invest in your team and go to SQLBits?

    March 30th, 2023 in Blog, Community, News

    A week or two back the entire Purple Frog and Power BI Sentinel team traveled over to Wales to attend SQLBits, which if you didn’t know, is the world’s largest data platform event! This year we had the privilege to go SQLBits wearing two hats; delegate and sponsor – go big or go home, right? I thought I’d share some insights into what I, and the team, thought about spending a week at the ICC Wales with overwhelming amounts of training to…

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  • How to add text to images using Python

    March 13th, 2023 in Blog, Just For Fun, Python, Uncategorised

    In this blog post, I will be showing how to add text to an image in Python. I used this code to generate hundreds of images with different text for one of our clients. The full script is downloadable at the bottom with the required extras. Firstly, install the Python library Pillow. Pillow is a PIL fork, install Pillow using pip and import PIL into the Python script.           In Python, select the image that you would…

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  • Power BI – Visual to show filters that have been applied to a report

    March 13th, 2023 in Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI

      Most PowerBi reports will use slicers to allow the user to filter and interact with the visuals they have. But in practice, users may forget what slicers have been applied. It’s inconvenient to have to look through each slicer, potentially across multiple pages, to see what filters are being used on the report. Therefore, it is not user friendly. We need to show every filter that has been applied in one convenient place. Thankfully,…

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  • 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…

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  • Linked Server with Unique Identifier Issue

    March 2nd, 2023 in Blog, Linked Server, SQL Server, Synapse

    There is currently an issue with Linked Servers when querying and filtering by a guid (uniqueidentifier). If you query a Synapse SQL pool from your on-prem SQL server, for example, and attempt to filter the results using a uniqueidentifier column, you will get the following error message: Msg 103010, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Parse error at line: 1, column: 408: Incorrect syntax near ‘guid’. Msg 110811, Level 16, State 1, Line 1…

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  • My Jupyter Notebook Crashed and Now Won’t Open

    February 14th, 2023 in Blog, Jupyter, Python

    This is a problem that has plagued me a few times and is usually due to outputting too much in a single cell. The Notebook will run out of memory and crash, but it will contain the output that caused the notebook to crash. The notebook will crash every time you open it, for some browsers you may even see an ‘out of memory’ error message. The solution to this problem is to delete the vast amount of output, without opening the…

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  • Part 4: Natural Language Processing – Bringing it all together!

    January 23rd, 2023 in AI, Azure, Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, DAX, Power BI, Python

    Here’s the final post in this blog series on natural language processing where we are going to bring everything together and web scrape Trust Pilot for review data, which we will then perform Natural Language Processing on and then display in a Power Bi dashboard. I’ll be talking exclusively practically in this demo, so for a refresher on the theory please refer back to my earlier blogposts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). To re-iterate the goal…

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  • Using ChatGPT as a Development Tool

    January 4th, 2023 in AI, Blog, Cloud, DAX, Just For Fun, Other

    As a developer, you are always looking for ways to streamline your workflow and improve efficiency. One tool that you should consider adding to your development toolkit is ChatGPT. What is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses the power of machine learning to understand and generate human-like text. It is trained on a large dataset of human conversations, which allows it to understand the context and nuances of language,…

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  • SQL Server Agent Gantt Chart in Power BI

    December 22nd, 2022 in Blog, Power BI, PowerBI, SQL Server

    In this blog post, I walk-through how to use a Power BI template file I have created that displays a Gantt chart which shows which SQL Server Agent Jobs have run and when. The purpose of the chart is to identify when jobs are overlapping and taking server resource off each other. If two or more resource intensive jobs overlap, it’s a good idea to schedule them at different times if possible. To use the template file, input the server name.…

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  • Purple Frog at AI and Big Data Expo

    December 15th, 2022 in AI, Big Data, Blog

    During the 1st and 2nd of December, Purple Frog descended on London Olympia for 2 days of AI, ML and Big Data based fun at the AI & Big Data Expo. The AI and Big Data Expo is a leading Artificial Intelligence & Big Data Conference & Exhibition that showcases the next generation enterprise technologies and strategies from the world of Artificial Intelligence & Big Data, providing an opportunity to explore and discover the…

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