Fabric Archives - Purple Frog Systems

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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Fabric Toolbox: A Helpful Resource for Exploring Fabric
March 5^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
As Microsoft Fabric adoption grows, many businesses are starting to move beyond experimentation and into building production analytics platforms. However, implementing and managing a modern data platform still involves more than simply enabling the technology. To help teams get started and explore best practices, Microsoft and the wider community have introduced Fabric Toolbox, a collection of open source resources designed to support Microsoft…
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Part 1: Using the Companies House API
February 13^th, 2026 in Blog, Business Intelligence, CSV, Data analytics, Export, Fabric, Jupyter, Python, Visual Studio
The .gov website hosts companies house and the companies house API. This is a comprehensive list of businesses across the UK, new and old, big and small, and their filings and info. You can interact with this information via code such as Python. The following blog post series will show you how to perform an advanced search of companies – using multiple different filters to get specific businesses – and then looping through these results to…
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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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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