Agile BI Community

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 a a little utility to help apply standards to to DTA recommendations. I use the SQL ...

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 @@SERVERNAME   You will get the name of the machine from when you ...

A few weeks ago I spoke at PASS on using the Resource Governor in SQL Server 2008.  For my demo, I created a little application that could fire off multiple queries against SQL Server to simulate different users/applications.  This tool… gasp… creates a load on SQL Server.  People seemed interested in the application, so I’ve ...

I've spent the past 15 months, off and on, working as the technical lead on a performance management project using PerformancePoint Server.  The project was to create a SharePoint Portal where users could view the performance of a school system.  The portal was initially internally facing, but the goal was to make it ...

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. If you are there, drop by the session and say hello.

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, including one on data profiling in the ETL process, one of my favorite topics. Again, it's ...

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 the SQL Server community samples on CodePlex), and Adam Machanic as the moderator. The discussion ...

Stuart Ozer on the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (CAT) has posted a new tool to CodePlex to help with the management of "staging" tables for swapping data in and out of partitioned tables. Since this is a common scenario in data warehousing scenarios, I'm really looking forward to trying this out on my next project. If you are ...

A question was posted on the MSDN forums about validating that there are no overlapping rows in a slowly changing dimension (SCD). It is common to use a start and end date in a type 2 SCD to designate when each version of the dimension member was in effect. However, it can create problems if the date ranges for one version of the row overlap with ...

I was on the CodePlex (www.codeplex.com) site today looking for the Analysis Services Stored Procedure project, and found that they have a number of SQL Server related projects available. First, all of the SQL Server samples have been uploaded to the site, which is nice if you only want to grab one or two of them. There is also the ...