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Front Page News
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Last post on presentations for a while, I think / hope. I'll be presenting on Unit Testing in SSIS at the PASS Summit 2008 , occurring in Seattle, WA from Nov. 18-21. There's lots of great content planned at PASS this year, and it's definitely worth attending....
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I'm doing a couple of chalk talks at the Microsoft BI Conference , occurring in Seattle, WA on October 6-8. The chalk talks are a different format than the typical presentation: smaller audience, no (or very few) slides, and more conversational in format....
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There's a SQL Saturday coming up in Greenville, SC on October 11th. It's a free, day long event with a number of great speakers doing sessions. I don't include myself in the great speaker category, but I was asked to present a couple of sessions on SSIS,...
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but not very far, just to Nov. 5-7. In order to provide more value to attendees, the BI conference is being run at the same time as the SharePoint, SQL, and .NET conferences. So now, instead of just having access to the BI content, you'll be able to pick...
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I'm presenting at the Triad SQL Server User Group tomorrow night on Migrating to Reporting Services 2008. It was a lively group last time I was there, and I'm looking forward to visiting them again. If you are in the area, please stop by. Here's the abstract...
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A question that comes up occasionally is how to handle errors that occur on the OLE DB Destination in the data flow. Errors that occur when using the OLE DB Destination to insert into a table are usually caused by primary key, foreign key, or check constraints...
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The 1.0 bits for ssisUnit are now on CodePlex . The Release page for it includes versions for SQL Server 2005 and 2008. The biggest feature in this release is a GUI for creating the unit tests. The test files are still XML, but the GUI abstracts away...
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A number of the SSIS MVPs were asked to contribute a white paper to MSDN a few months ago, and those articles were published recently. You'll notice a common thread in most of the topics: Considerations for High Volume ETL Using SQL Server Integration...
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While at TechEd this summer, I participated in a panel discussion on testing the database and related technologies. The panel also included Gert Drapers and Jamie Laflen of the Visual Studio Team System - Database Edition team, David Reed (who manages...
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I came across a question about this the other day, and thought I'd share the answer here, as there doesn't seem to be much information out there about it. The questioner wanted to know how to read a portion of an XML document into a variable. Fortunately,...
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I'm going to be presenting a few sessions at the upcoming SSWUG Virtual Business Intelligence Conference . It's occurring from September 24-26, 2008. It has a very impressive list of speakers (I'm really not sure how I made it on the list - it's quite...
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I'm presenting at the Midlands PASS chapter in Columbia, SC tomorrow night, July 17th. I'll be presenting on SSIS configurations and some common approaches for implementing them. Configurations are one of the best features about SSIS, but also one of...
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A common question on the SSIS forums is how to continue a loop after an error occurs. For example, you might have a For Each Loop container that iterates through a set of files in a folder. If one file is invalid, you want to continue processing the remaining...
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In a previous post, I detailed some of the challenges that I had encountered when trying to modify the connection string used for SQL Server configurations from the command line. In SSIS 2005, command line options were applied after the configurations...
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This is really cool – Mariner (my employer) was awarded the Microsoft Performance Management Partner of the Year award this year, based on a solution that we created for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) system. When I was first told about the award,...
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Douglas Laudenschlager has posted some good information about the considerations you need to make if you are running SSIS on a 64-bit box. This is additional information to what is currently in Books Online, and it’s well worth looking at. Considering...
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To finish up the topic that I started in my previous post , I wanted to post a more complex example of running total calculations. This is based off a request on the MSDN forums, for a running total calculation that would “slide” along as additional rows...
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Running totals are a common calculation for reporting, and are occasionally needed in ETL processes to populate aggregate tables. One way to accomplish this in SSIS, if you are retrieving data from a relational database, is to do the running total in...
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There's an interesting "behavior" that occurs with configurations at design time. The value of the configuration will be saved in your package as the new stored value. I'd seen this before, but never really thought about it, until a poster on the forums...
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Background Last week, I needed to prototype a report against an Analysis Services 2005 cube for a client. The report wasn't too complicated... I just had the requirement to allow a user to drill down a hierarchy by selecting a member at one level,...
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A question that comes up occasionally on the forums is how to determine if a file is being written to by another process. It can cause issues if a file is partially written when a source component starts extracting data from it. There is a way to check...
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On May 15th I'll be presenting at the Triad SQL Server User Group , located in High Point, NC. The presentation will be focusing on new features in SQL Server 2008 for business intelligence and data warehousing. If you're in the area, please stop in and...
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There are a number of new features in the 2008 Lookup Transform. Jamie Thomson posted a good overview of the features , and I recommend reading it prior to this article. One of the new features in SSIS 2008 is the ability to cache the data from the Lookup...
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In SSIS 2005, one of the challenges with the Lookup transform was that the SQL used to populate the cache was fixed at design time. You could dynamically pass in parameters to the SQL, but only if you turned on the advanced caching options, which puts...
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I found something interesting in SSIS 2008 today, and thought I'd share it. I was working with David Darden on a package that included a script task. In 2008, the Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) environment is used to edit script tasks. It...
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