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Business Intelligence

  • Combining Queries from Multiple Sources in Power BI using Merge and Append

    March 1st, 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 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…

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  • Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part2)

    July 30th, 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 10th, 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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  • Power BI – Enable Load

    April 16th, 2021 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Uncategorized

    In Power BI Power Query there is an option to enable or disable whether a table is loaded into the report. The option ‘Enable load’ can be found by right clicking on the table. Typically, by default, the load is already enabled. There is also an option ‘Include in report refresh’ which lets a user stop a table from refreshing when they refresh the entire report. This maybe useful for static tables or tables that are large which take a…

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  • ADF Switch Activity – A neat solution for nested IFs.

    December 17th, 2020 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Data Factory, SQL Server

    Whilst carrying out some work for a client using Azure Data Factory I was presented with the challenge of triggering different activities depending on the result of a stored procedure. In fact the challenge posed was to… Execute ‘Copy A’ activity if the result of a stored procedure returned (A), Execute ‘Copy B’ activity if the result of a stored procedure returned (B), Execute ‘Copy C’ activity if the result of a stored…

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  • Tabular Cube Processing Report

    December 9th, 2020 in Analysis Services, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Tabular, Uncategorized

    I have created a Power BI report which provides detail on the state of processing in a Tabular Cube.The report uses the cube’s dynamic management views to provide information about the cube’s partitions. To use the tabular cube processing report, you need to insert the following information: Server Database (Cube Name) Once entered and assuming the connection is fine you need to accept some native queries. These statements are select…

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  • How to block the creation of a classic workspace in powerbi.com when a new MS Team is created!

    August 18th, 2020 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI

    There is now a new tenant setting for Power BI admins to prevent users from creating classic workspaces in Power BI! This includes from places like MS Teams! Hurrah! If you’re a Power BI Admin you can now enable ‘Block classic workspace creation’. To do this go to the powerbi.com portal and click the ‘settings’ icon in the top right hand corner of the screen. Click on ‘Admin portal’ and then locate and…

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  • My experience in obtaining an MCSE

    August 7th, 2020 in Analysis Services, Blog, Business Intelligence, Integration Services, SQL Server

    Background I have recently completed my MCSE in Data Management and Analytics, and I wanted to share my experience of working towards and passing the exams that have led to me getting this MCSE. In this post I will cover some of the challenges I faced and provide some tips and advice, hopefully others following the same certification path, or other paths, will find this useful. I am a business intelligence developer at Purple Frog, I have…

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  • ADF: Where have my connections gone?

    June 12th, 2020 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Data Factory

    If you’ve been doing any development work in ADF this week you might have noticed that “Connections” has moved. But where has it gone? When you click onto “Connections” now you’ll receive the following message: Clicking this button takes you to the new Management Hub, the new fourth icon which goes alongside the existing three. Within this area you now have access to your Linked Services, Integration Runtimes…

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