Fabric Archives - Purple Frog Systems

Fabric Capacity Smoothing: Why This Morning’s Job Is Slowing This Afternoon’s Reports
November 5^th, 2026 in Blog, Fabric
It’s 2pm on a Tuesday. Reports that normally load in a couple of seconds are crawling, a few users are complaining and the obvious question gets asked: what’s running right now? You check, and the answer is… not much at all. The capacity looks quiet. The culprit turns out to be a large semantic model refresh that ran at 6am and finished hours ago. If you’ve been in that situation, or had a support ticket like it land in…
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FabCon Europe 2026: What Fabric IQ, Foundry and Agents Mean for Data Engineers
October 12^th, 2026 in AI, Azure, Blog, Data Lakehouse, Fabric, Foundry
The biggest AI story from Barcelona wasn’t a model announcement. It was Microsoft making the case that agents are only as good as the data and definitions beneath them, which puts data engineering at the centre of the AI conversation. Here’s a quick map of the names, from the data layer up: Fabric: ingest, transform, store, govern and serve data. Home turf. Fabric IQ: business context (entities, measures, relationships) on top of your data…
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FabCon Europe 2026: News from Barcelona!
October 6^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
Last week me and the team were in Barcelona for FabCon Europe, alongside nearly 5,000 other data professionals. This year’s keynote had a clear message: Fabric is now the context for AI Microsoft’s pitch focused on Microsoft IQ (Work, Foundry, Web and Fabric IQ). Fabric IQ is the bit we care about. OneLake data, semantic model measures, ontologies and real-time signals, combined into something agents can reason over. Data flows in…
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Running Fabric Pipelines from a Notebook
September 17^th, 2026 in Blog, Fabric
Everyone knows the easy direction: drop a Notebook activity into a pipeline, and the pipeline waits for it to finish before moving on. The reverse, a notebook kicking off a pipeline and waiting for success or failure, is less documented. Here’s a working pattern for that: trigger the pipeline you want to run, monitor it at the activity level rather than just the top-level job status, and raise on failure. For the rest of this post, treat…
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SQL Server vs Fabric Warehouse: T-SQL gotchas nobody warns you about
July 23^rd, 2026 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric, SQL, SQL Server
Fabric Warehouse looks just like SQL Server. It uses T-SQL, has schemas, stored procs and more. Yet, you migrate your first proper workload and see “that’s not supported” errors you never had to think about before. Fabric Warehouse isn’t SQL Server. Under the bonnet it’s storing everything as Delta Parquet in OneLake, and that storage format shapes what T-SQL can and can’t do. Here’s what actually trips…
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Fabric Workspace Monitoring: What It Actually Shows You
July 17^th, 2026 in Blog, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
Fabric Workspace Monitoring: What It Actually Shows You Ever had a Fabric pipeline hang for no obvious reason, or watched a semantic model refresh crawl with no explanation? Fabric Workspace Monitoring is built for exactly that. Flip one toggle in workspace settings and Fabric spins up a read only Eventhouse, streaming execution logs, query text, CPU consumption, and error data into KQL tables you can query directly. Nothing to install, no…
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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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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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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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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