Business Intelligence Archives - Purple Frog Systems

What is Microsoft Fabric? (Power BI + Synapse + DW + DataLake + ML)
May 23^rd, 2023 in AI, Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, Data Factory, Data Lake, Fabric, Power BI, PowerBI, Spark
At today’s Build conference, Microsoft announced Fabric. What is this? In simple terms, think of taking Synapse Analytics, Data Warehousing, Data Lakes, Data Factory, Spark Notebooks and Machine Learning, and bring them all together into Power BI. This is underpinned by Microsoft OneLake, a high performance scalable data lake storage layer, supporting all of the above. OneLake is, as the name implies, one data lake that can be used across…
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Power BI – Visual to show filters that have been applied to a report
March 13^th, 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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Part 4: Natural Language Processing – Bringing it all together!
January 23^rd, 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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Part 3: Natural Language Processing – Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
November 24^th, 2022 in AI, Azure, Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, Python, Synapse
If you remember in part 2 we discussed what Key Word Analysis is and how this can be implemented to gain deeper insight from textual data. But we can go one step deeper and extract feelings and opinions from the same data. We can do this through Sentiment Analysis and Opinion mining! In this blog I will talk you through what they are and how we can implement them using Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. What is Sentiment Analysis? We should…
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Previous Row Value DAX
October 18^th, 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…
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How to Trigger a Power BI Dataset Refresh via Azure Synapse Analytics in 3 Simple Steps.
June 27^th, 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…
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Combining Queries from Multiple Sources in Power BI using Merge and Append
March 1^st, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server, Uncategorized
It is always good practice to do as much data preparation as close to the sources as you can before importing or connecting them to your Power BI reports, but what if there are circumstances where this isn’t possible? I had an issue recently where a third-party application had been updated and both the new and legacy versions were being used side-by-side. Logging data from both versions was being written to two separate Azure SQL databases.…
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How to resolve SSIS “Row yielded no match during lookup” error.
January 26^th, 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…
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Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part2)
July 30^th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse
So in part 1 we found out what Workload Management was and why we wanted to use it. (If you haven’t read that part, please click here and read that post before you carry on, as we’re jumping in at the deep end!) In this part we’ll be learning how to configure it. Continuing from the end of the previous post, you have two main options to configure this. First is to assign a user or role to one of the existing system defined…
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Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part1)
June 10^th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse
So you’ve started using Synapse SQL Pools, you’ve scaled up to improve performance, but your queries aren’t going as fast as you’d hoped. You take a look at resource utilisation and you see that as you scale up, your total resource utilisation per query goes down. But didn’t we scale up to allow our query to use more resource and run quicker? What’s going on here? A little thing called Workload Management.…
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Alex Whittles (MVP)
Jeet Kainth
Jon Fletcher
Nick Edwards
Joe Billingham
Lewis Prince
Tom Owen
Callum Bryant
James Snow
Laura Adamson
Annabel Hemingbrough
Hollie Whittles