Blog Archives - Page 4 of 37 - Purple Frog Systems

AI Warnings, Real Risks, and Why Businesses Should Not Panic
January 19^th, 2026 in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Blog
You may have seen recent headlines quoting former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warning that future AI systems (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/2/google-ceo-ai-self-improvement/) could become difficult for humans to fully understand or control. These comments reflect genuine long-term considerations around autonomy, speed and governance, but much of the media coverage amplifies them into dramatic worst-case scenarios. For most organisations…
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Is ETL now a Circular Process?
December 24^th, 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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Building an AI-Ready UK Workforce: Turning Insight into Action
December 19^th, 2025 in AI, Blog, Business
Artificial intelligence is already changing how work gets done across the UK economy. From healthcare and financial services to construction, clean energy and the creative industries, organisations are experimenting with AI to improve productivity, decision-making and service delivery. But as the AI Skills for the UK Workforce report makes clear, technology alone is not the challenge. Skills…
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Reflecting on 2025 & looking ahead to 2026: a data-driven perspective
December 19^th, 2025 in Artificial Intelligence, Blog, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Real-time Data, Reporting Services
As 2025 draws to a close, it is clear this year marked a pivotal shift in how businesses leverage data and artificial intelligence (AI). What was once considered experimental has firmly become strategic, operational, and value-creating for organisations of every size from nimble local businesses to ambitious global brands. At Purple Frog, our work helping UK businesses transform data into business insight has shown a dramatic evolution in…
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Enforcing NOT NULL in a CTAS
December 9^th, 2025 in Blog, SQL
In this blog I will show you how to use a CTAS to create a table with non-nullable columns. I have a table with the following structure (note all columns are non-nullable): CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Date] ( [Date] DATE NOT NULL, [Day] INT NOT NULL, [Week] INT NOT NULL, [Month] INT NOT NULL, [Quarter] INT NOT NULL, [Year] INT NOT NULL ) GO If I want to create a new version of this table with an additional column called YearMonth, the easiest way to do…
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Perception of AI-Generated Content: Copilot vs. Gemini vs. ChatGPT
November 29^th, 2025 in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Blog, Just For Fun
In this post, I’m diving into an experiment I conducted as part of a university assignment. The course focused on surveys, and I decided to explore whether people could detect AI-generated content compared to human-written copy. The results were intriguing, so let’s jump into my findings and see which AI tool comes out on top for me: Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, or OpenAI ChatGPT. (Just for fun!) My survey was titled “Perception…
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Back Up and Restore a Fabric Lakehouse
November 27^th, 2025 in Backup, Blog, Fabric, Restore Point
Fabric Lakehouses have been around for a while, but they still offer no native way to back them up or restore them. Fortunately, the way Lakehouses are structured makes it possible to build your own backup process. A Lakehouse is split into two areas: Files and Tables. The Files area is straightforward, you can download and back up these items directly. The Tables are powered by Delta tables, which are made up of two key components: the…
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Using Microsoft Fabric PySpark Notebooks to Combine Different File Formats Together
November 13^th, 2025 in Blog, Data Lakehouse, Fabric, Python
One of the strengths of Microsoft Fabric is how easily it handles different data formats within a single notebook. Whether your data arrives as a CSV file, a JSON file, an XML file, or anything in between, PySpark (or Python) gives you a consistent way to read, transform, and combine it. This makes Fabric an ideal environment for building data pipelines without relying on complex integrations. In this example, I’ve loaded three completely…
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Technology, Humanity and the Future we Build Together
November 10^th, 2025 in Blog, Community
I recently attended the GTIA (Global Technology Industry Association) ChannelCon EMEA event at London Heathrow, which brought many businesses together from across the technology channel. As Vice-Chair of the UK & Ireland Executive Council for GTIA, I had the privilege of attending the closing keynote by Sir Bob Geldof, and I can honestly say it was one of the most challenging and thought-provoking presentations. Keynote Sir Bob opened…
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Why Community and Recognition are Game-Changers for Shropshire Businesses
November 10^th, 2025 in Blog, Community, News
In today’s fast-paced business world, it’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind – chasing leads, managing teams, and keeping up with change. But for many businesses, the real magic happens when they look beyond their own walls and tap into something bigger: community. One shining example of this is the GTIA (Global Technology Industry Association) community. Joining the GTIA community has benefited our business in numerous ways,…
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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