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  • Part 2: Using the Companies House API

    Part 2: Using the companies house API, by CallumJune 26th, 2026 in Blog, Business Intelligence, Jupyter, Python

    Part 2: Using the Companies House API Welcome back following part 1… Getting a list of companies via Python – Advanced Filtering. This example will look at the transport sector, leveraging the SIC codes in companies house. This can be altered accordingly to suit the business nature you are looking for. The libraries allows you to do more with Python, in this example that will included API calls, referencing the current date time and…

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  • Python Dictionaries – What do I need to know?

    Python Dictionaries – What do I need to know?April 16th, 2026 in Blog, Python

    When you’re learning Python, dictionaries are one of the most important data structures you’ll encounter. Unlike lists (see blog post) which store items by position, dictionaries store data as key-value pairs, making them the natural choice whenever you need to look something up by name rather than by index. In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Python dictionaries: what they are, how they work, and how to…

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  • Part 1: Using the Companies House API

    : A person wearing a Purple Frog-branded polo shirt stands with arms crossed in front of a modern curved glass building. The background features a purple geometric design with hexagons and circular tech-style graphics. Text on the right reads: ‘Part 1: Using the companies house API.’February 13th, 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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  • Using Microsoft Fabric PySpark Notebooks to Combine Different File Formats Together

    Purple Frog Systems consultant Nick Edwards stands in front of a graphic background featuring a modern glass building and hexagonal patterns. He is wearing a black and purple Purple Frog-branded polo shirt. White text on the right reads: ‘Combining File Formats with Microsoft Fabric PySpark Notebooks.November 13th, 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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  • Why DuckDB Is the Data Engineer’s New Secret Weapon

    August 6th, 2025 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Python, SQL, Uncategorised

          Most databases need a server. DuckDB doesn’t. It’s a zero‑config, in‑process OLAP database you can run directly using Python. It’s fast, SQL‑friendly, and speaks Parquet like a native language — no clusters, no heavyweight setup, no waiting for provisioning. Think of DuckDB as SQLite for analytics — but faster, more column‑aware, and built for modern data engineering.   What Makes DuckDB Special DuckDB…

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  • Python Lists – What do I need to know?

    Python Lists – What Do I Need to Know?July 21st, 2025 in Blog, Python

    When you’re learning Python, lists are one of the first data structures you’ll encounter. They’re simple, powerful, and flexible. But what should you really know to use them effectively? In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Python lists: what they are, how they work, and how to use them efficiently. What is a Python List? A list is a mutable, ordered, heterogeneous collection of items. Think of it as a…

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  • SQLBits 2025: The year you couldn’t escape AI

    SQLBits 2025: The year you couldn't escape AIJuly 1st, 2025 in AI, Artificial Intelligence, Blog, Community, Machine Learning, Python, Spark

    As an AI engineer immersed in the ever-evolving world of data and machine learning, conferences offer more than just networking opportunities; they’re essential refuelling stations for inspiration, learning and innovation. To be frank, SQLBits usually doesn’t fully fit the bill for me as an AI engineer, but as the lines between AI and data engineering have become increasingly blurred, the content of the talks has evolved to reflect…

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  • How to Run T-SQL in Microsoft Fabric Python Notebooks

    June 26th, 2025 in Blog, Python, SQL

    Here at Purple Frog Systems, I’ve been experimenting with pure Python Notebooks rather than PySpark Notebooks for small to medium datasets, due to their super quick start up time and reduced CU consumption for customers with smaller F-SKUs. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-engineering/fabric-notebook-selection-guide When scrolling through LinkedIn I came across a Microsoft Blog which allows you to combine T-SQL and Python within…

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  • How to use T-SQL to Query and Monitor your Microsoft Fabric Capacity App

    October 18th, 2024 in Blog, Fabric, Python

    The Fabric Capacity App Report has received some mixed reviews regarding its usability. But what if you could query the underlying dataset, load it into a Fabric Lakehouse, and then use standard T-SQL for querying instead. This is possible with the use of a Fabric notebook and Semantic Link or SemPy! Prerequisites: The Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics App must be installed in your tenant with the necessary access and reside in a Fabric/Premium…

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  • Connecting Your Fabric Data Warehouse to Spark Notebooks

    January 19th, 2024 in Blog, Data Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Python, Spark

    When using Spark notebooks in Fabric, it is very easy to connect directly to a Lakehouse. From here, you can see all of the data that is stored in tables and click and drop to insert code snippets to extract the data. Here at Purple Frog, it is common to have projects using Data Warehouses as their data store. When looking at ways to connect Notebooks to a warehouse, there is currently  little information available online; One way that is…

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