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Front Page News
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It’s generally accepted* that when you are using an OLE DB Source or an ADO.NET Source, you should specify all the columns, rather than selecting the table from the dropdown, or using a SELECT * SQL statement. If you’re like me, then you probably don’t...
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I’ll be presenting at the Columbia, SC PASS user group on July 7. I’ll be speaking on “Getting Started with Analysis Services 2008”, which is a demo heavy introduction to using SQL Server Analysis Services 2008. If you want to use SSAS, but aren’t sure...
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I ran across an interesting behavior in SSIS this week, and thought it was worth sharing. Occasionally, I’ll have the need to use the value of a variable (set in the control flow) in the data flow. The typical way to accomplish this is to use a Derived...
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I was writing a script the other day where I want to return a collection of Services based on the name. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do this, so I thought I’d jot it down. Nothing revolutionary, but I’ve definitely found this...
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I recently started using SSAS Server Traces a lot with SQL Server Analysis Services. This type of trace is basically the same trace you can create with SQL Server Profiler, but it runs without Profiler, uses less resources, and can be persisted across...
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A topic that often comes up when discussing enterprise level development with SSAS is how to have multiple developers work on the same project at the same time. This issue doesn’t come up for many installations… a lot of teams get away with just having...
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A recent post on the SSIS forums was asking about creating multiple rows in a text output file from a single row in the data flow. Given a set of rows like this: John Smith 1/1/1900 Value A Jane Smith 12/1/1900 Value B the poster wanted this output in...
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I’ve uploaded the ‘Database Tuning Advisor Output Renamer’ at http://DtaOutputRenamer.codeplex.com/ . OK… so Friday marked the first day I’ve ever gotten sunburned while coding. I had a little bit of free time while at an outdoor event, and whipped up...
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If you’ve done much work with SSIS, you’re probably aware that on opening a package in BIDS, SSIS validates all the objects in the package. This can cause the packages to open very slowly, particularly if it has connections to a database that is currently...
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There is a free community event from SSWUG coming up on April 17th. For people interested in Analysis Services (and who isn’t?), you’ll be able to see a webcast from Donald Farmer on developing high performance cubes. If you haven’t heard Donald speak...
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I use virtual machines a lot for development and testing. I typically start with a sysprepped base image that I then initialize every time I need a new machine. One issue is that SQL Server doesn’t know it has been sysprepped… if you execute 1: SELECT...
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Just a quick tip related to a recent problem I had with a custom task I developed for SSIS. I had to recompile it recently, and in the process, managed to change the public key associated with the assembly. Since SSIS uses strong names (which include...
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It’s been a busy first quarter, but I should have a little more time available to blog now. I’ve just completed shooting my sessions for the SSWUG Business Intelligence Virtual Conference , which has been one of the things occupying my time recently....
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Historically, scale up has been the model for Microsoft data warehouses. Running a large, multi-terabyte data warehouse meant buying a lot of hardware for a single server, and hoping that it would be enough, once the warehouse was fully loaded and under...
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Recently, a user on the MSDN forums asked how to check an Agent job from SSIS to see if it’s completed. Once it had completed, additional steps need to be performed, for example, archiving flat files. However, this couldn’t be done till the job completed....
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I’m going to be doing 3 sessions at the upcoming SSWUG BI Virtual Conference . If you are interested in getting an introduction to SQL Data Services (SDS), I’ll be doing an introductory session on it, and then covering how it can be used from SSIS and...
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In my initial post about doing iterative development for BI/DW projects, I mentioned that one of the challenges was developing a solid foundation while doing iterative development, especially in the first few iterations. If you are started from scratch...
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If you develop in Visual Studio using C# or VB, then you are probably familiar with code snippets. They are little chunks of code that you can insert into your application and save you some typing. For example, if you are writing a C# application, and...
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Today’s economy and business environment poses problems for many IT departments. Budgets are tight, companies are looking for ways to reduce headcount, and strategic investments are not very popular right now. Instead, companies are focusing on projects...
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We encountered an issue recently in an ETL process during the extract portion. When extracting from one very large table, using a NOLOCK hint, we were encountering errors indicating that the data was changing while we were extracting it. Since no other...
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If you follow business intelligence news at all, then you probably saw the news from Microsoft last week that PerformancePoint is becoming a component of SharePoint . However, it won’t be all of PerformancePoint – the Plan portion will see one additional...
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When I originally started this blog, I wanted to cover agile development in BI/DW projects, as well as technical topics about BI. However, it didn’t work out quite that way. I’ve posted a few thing here and there about agile development on this blog,...
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As I mentioned in my previous post , defining an appropriate scope is difficult when you are attempting to do iterative development on BI/DW projects. The problems with this are not unique to BI/DW projects, of course. All projects have scope issues....
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The launch event in Charlotte went very well – we had over 100 people in attendance, and the sessions were packed. We had a lot of good information on the new features in SQL Server 2008, covering the new T-SQL features, server consolidation, dimensional...
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I’m a fan of agile development. Prior to focusing on business intelligence and data warehousing, I architected and developed client server and n-tier applications, and I found that agile development techniques delivered better end results. I believe that,...
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