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Synapse

  • My Broken Query Runs Successfully in Synapse, Not That I’m Complaining, But How?

    My Broken Query Runs Successfully in Synapse, Not That I'm Complaining, But How?May 14th, 2026 in Blog, SQL, SQL Server, Synapse

    I had one of those moments this week, I spent too long trying to figure out how something that I knew was broken, was running fine and throwing no errors. Can it be called troubleshooting if it isn’t causing trouble? I have a Synapse pipeline that’s been running just fine for months, due to some migration work, I needed to take a look at the source query and found it was broken. I had it open in SSMS on the other monitor, ran it,…

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  • Data Factory pipeline failure with a “null” error message

    March 10th, 2025 in ADFv2, Blog, Data Factory, Fabric, Synapse

    Have you ever had this error when running a pipeline in ADF or Synapse? I have now seen this more than once and it can be frustrating to debug the issue. After trying a few different setups in Synapse I have found that the following scenarios all result in the same error: 1. An Until activity inside an If Condition 2. A nested ForEach activity 3. A parameter with “-” in the parameter name For 1 and 2 it is not possible to create…

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  • Parameter Overrides in Synapse Workspace Release

    June 7th, 2024 in Azure DevOps, Blog, Synapse

    In this blog I will show you how to override pipeline parameter values when releasing a synapse workspace. This blog does not cover the Azure DevOps setup or the setup of the workspace release, it is purely about how to override parameters in the synapse deployment task. By default, the parameter template called “TemplateParametersForWorkspace.json” is used by Synapse, this can be seen in the workspace_publish branch in Repos in…

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  • Synapse Data Flow bug

    March 1st, 2024 in Azure, Blog, Synapse

    I recently came across some unexpected output in a dedicated SQL Pool in Azure Synapse Analytics, upon investigation I realised this is as a result of an issue in Data Flows. This blog shows the issue using dummy data and a temporary workaround. At the time of writing (01/03/2024), this is still an issue and has been raised with Microsoft. I will provide a further update once Microsoft have resolved the issue or provided a suitable fix. Below is…

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  • Synapse Script Activity Error “Argument {0} is null or empty.\r\nParameter name: paraKey”

    November 1st, 2023 in Activity Error, ADFv2, Azure, Blog, Data Factory, SQL, Synapse, Uncategorised

    Came across this issue when trying to get a range of values that are calculated dynamically at runtime. Using the script activity in ADF, I wanted a result set that I could reference as parameters for a notebook later in the pipeline but was experiencing an error I had not seen before referencing null arguments. The Problem The script is simple – get a few key dates from the last few months and set these as variables. Finally, return these…

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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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  • Synapse Copy Activity Fails Over Certain File Size – ADF

    July 21st, 2023 in Azure, Blog, CSV, Data Factory, Data Lake, Synapse

    Copy Activity Issue in ADF / Synapse Analytics Recently, when trying to copy a .csv file from an FTP source to a Azure Data Lake using a Copy Activity in Azure Synapse, I had an issue where files > 16MB in size would fail. To overcome this, I took the first 13k rows and created another file from this, which resulted in a 4MB file. I tested this extra small file and it worked in the copy activity no issues. I multiplied these same 13k rows out…

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  • @@ROWCOUNT in Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool

    June 6th, 2023 in Blog, SQL Server, Synapse

    If you’ve been working with dedicated SQL pools in Synapse, you may have noticed that the SQL Server system variable @@RowCount is not supported. I will show you a workaround in synapse to get the same information. First, use the query label option to give your query an identifier that you can use to track it: SELECT * FROM Dim.Date OPTION (LABEL = ‘MyQuery’) You can then use DMVs to find your query using the specified label…

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  • Linked Server with Unique Identifier Issue

    March 2nd, 2023 in Blog, Linked Server, SQL Server, Synapse

    There is currently an issue with Linked Servers when querying and filtering by a guid (uniqueidentifier). If you query a Synapse SQL pool from your on-prem SQL server, for example, and attempt to filter the results using a uniqueidentifier column, you will get the following error message: Msg 103010, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Parse error at line: 1, column: 408: Incorrect syntax near ‘guid’. Msg 110811, Level 16, State 1, Line 1…

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  • Part 3: Natural Language Processing – Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

    November 24th, 2022 in AI, Azure, Big Data, Blog, Business Intelligence, Python, Synapse

    If you remember in part 2 we discussed what Key Word Analysis is and how this can be implemented to gain deeper insight from textual data. But we can go one step deeper and extract feelings and opinions from the same data. We can do this through Sentiment Analysis and Opinion mining! In this blog I will talk you through what they are and how we can implement them using Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. What is Sentiment Analysis? We should…

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