Blog Archives - Page 2 of 37 - Purple Frog Systems

Baking Up Better Data: Microsoft Fabric and the Fabric Toolbox
May 8^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Data Factory, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
Recently, I presented a talk at the Birmingham Data User Group, titled “Stop Hand-Whisking Your Data: Faster Fabric Development with the fabric-toolbox”. On the back of that, I wanted to summarise the talk into a blog and share how you can use fabric-toolbox to enhance your Fabric development. Data engineering can feel abstract. Layers upon layers of transformation, movement, and logic that are hard to visualise at a glance. So, when talking…
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SQLBits 2026: What I Took Away from ICC Wales
May 8^th, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence, Blog, Purple Frog Systems
SQLBits returned to the ICC Wales in Newport from 22 to 25 April for four days of solid content, good networking, and the usual conference energy. The cartoon theme was a nice touch. This post covers the three areas I found most valuable: AI agents and the Foundry stack, Model Context Protocol, and Polars as a genuine alternative to Spark on Fabric. AI Agents and Azure AI Foundry AI and agentic AI were a dominant theme, with sessions covering…
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Time Travel in Microsoft Fabric Warehouses
May 7^th, 2026 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Warehouse
Have you ever wished you could see what your data looked like last Tuesday? With time travel in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse, you can! Time travel in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse provides the ability to query your data exactly as it existed at any point within the last 30 days, without maintaining separate historical snapshots or copies. Fabric Warehouse is built on Delta Lake, which records every insert, update, and delete as a new version in the…
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SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO: Why the “Answer” is Your New SEO Strategy
May 5^th, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence, Blog
What’s the Difference? SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Focuses on ranking your website in traditional search results to earn clicks. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation): Focuses on making your content the direct answer synthesised by AI. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): Focuses on ensuring your brand is present and cited across all AI ecosystems (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude). Basically, SEO gets you on the list AEO makes you the answer GEO…
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Businesses with purpose, not just profit – Jo Tutchener-Sharp’s incredible Scamp & Dude story
April 17^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, News, Purple Frog Systems
Businesses with purpose, not just profit – Jo Tutchener-Sharp’s incredible Scamp & Dude story This morning’s FSB Big Networking event gave us something truly special. Alongside my co-host David Bell, I had the privilege of sitting down with Jo Tutchener-Sharp, founder of Scamp & Dude, a brand that proves a great business can also do extraordinary good in the world. Where it all began Scamp & Dude wasn’t born…
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Python Dictionaries – What do I need to know?
April 16^th, 2026 in Blog, Python
When you’re learning Python, dictionaries are one of the most important data structures you’ll encounter. Unlike lists (see blog post) which store items by position, dictionaries store data as key-value pairs, making them the natural choice whenever you need to look something up by name rather than by index. In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Python dictionaries: what they are, how they work, and how to…
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Choosing the Right AI Tool: Copilot vs ChatGPT vs Claude Explained
April 14^th, 2026 in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Blog, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot
If you’ve been following our Frog Blog, you’ll know we recently broke down the differences between ChatGPT and Claude, and which one your business should be using. We ended that post with a teaser: where does Microsoft Copilot fit into all of this? That’s exactly what we’re covering today. Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude are the three AI tools businesses ask us about most. They’re not interchangeable, and choosing the…
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Stop Writing the Morning Trading Report, Automate It with AI
April 1^st, 2026 in AI, Blog, Fabric
The Morning Ritual Nobody Loves Every morning in retail, somewhere between 8am and 10am, someone pulls yesterday’s sales figures, checks the weather, tries to recall which promotion was running, consults the calendar for bank holidays, paydays, school terms or other significant trading periods and then drafts a few paragraphs for the leadership team. It is usually rushed and almost always takes longer than it should. What if it simply…
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What is Microsoft IQ?
March 27^th, 2026 in AI, Blog, Fabric, IQ, Microsoft Fabric
Enterprise AI is only as good as the context behind it. Microsoft IQ is the intelligence layer designed to give AI agents, and the people who rely on them, the business context they need to deliver genuinely useful, trustworthy answers and actions. Built across the Microsoft cloud stack, Microsoft IQ draws from three complementary sources: productivity signals, institutional knowledge, and live business data. Together, they form a shared,…
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Microsoft Fabric FabCon 2026 announcements that will transform your data stack
March 25^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Microsoft Fabric, News, Power BI
What Microsoft just revealed about the future of enterprise analytics… Microsoft’s FabCon 2026 conference unveiled a transformative vision for enterprise data and AI integration. Rather than incremental improvements to existing tools, the announcements represent a fundamental architectural shift. Fabric is evolving from a passive data platform into an active intelligence layer that drives real-time, autonomous decision-making across…
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Alex Whittles (MVP)
Annabel Hemingbrough
Callum Bryant
Hollie Whittles
James Snow
Jeet Kainth
Joe Billingham
Jon Fletcher
Laura Adamson
Lewis Prince (MVP)
Matt Mair-Durrant
Nick Edwards
Tom Owen