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  • Microsoft Fabric: Should I Use a Data Warehouse or Lakehouse?

    September 1st, 2023 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Power BI, Spark, SQL

    Fabric is the newest data analytics platform from Microsoft. It brings together the entire analytics process onto the Power BI service, meaning that you no longer need to be moving your data around from different services. The introduction of OneLake means that all data that you import whether from Cloud servers, On-Premises servers or more is available in one central location. With Fabric, you need to choose how you will store the data that you…

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  • Automate Power BI single table refresh using Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI APIs

    August 23rd, 2023 in Azure, Blog, Power BI, Synapse, Tabular

    In a blog I posted back in June 2022, I explained how you could trigger a Power BI dataset refresh via Azure Synapse Analytics. https://www.purplefrogsystems.com/2022/06/how-to-trigger-a-power-bi-dataset-refresh-via-azure-synapse-analytics-in-3-simple-steps/ However, what if you just wanted to refresh a select number of tables or objects rather than a full dataset? This might be the case if you are performing intraday loads in your ETL. There…

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  • Power BI – Recalculate / Refresh a Calculation Group

    June 20th, 2023 in Blog, Power BI

    In Power BI, when working with calculation groups, they will often need to be recalculated when certain changes are made. You will end up with this error message if you use a calculation group that’s been changed in your Power Bi Report: The query referenced Calculation Group Table ‘Calculation Group’ which does not hold any data because it needs to be recalculated or refreshed.   Thankfully, the solution to this error is quite simple…

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  • What is Microsoft Fabric? (Power BI + Synapse + DW + DataLake + ML)

    What Is Microsoft FabricMay 23rd, 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 13th, 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 23rd, 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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  • SQL Server Agent Gantt Chart in Power BI

    December 22nd, 2022 in Blog, Power BI, PowerBI, SQL Server

    In this blog post, I walk-through how to use a Power BI template file I have created that displays a Gantt chart which shows which SQL Server Agent Jobs have run and when. The purpose of the chart is to identify when jobs are overlapping and taking server resource off each other. If two or more resource intensive jobs overlap, it’s a good idea to schedule them at different times if possible. To use the template file, input the server name.…

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  • Previous Row Value DAX

    October 18th, 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 27th, 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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  • Download Power BI Reports using PowerShell

    April 14th, 2022 in Blog, Power BI, PowerShell, Uncategorized

    In this blog post I will be sharing a PowerShell script that allows multiple Power BI reports to be downloaded at once. In the Power BI service, there is no way of downloading multiple Power BI reports at once. Therefore, users must download files one by one which is slow, time consuming and inefficient. Thankfully, there are ways around this, one of which is using PowerShell. The script is downloadable at the bottom of the page as a txt file.…

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