Agile BI Community

I’ve been meaning to post about this ever since I saw Jamie’s post on “The SQL Developer Gap”. I couldn’t agree more with what Jamie expressed. Prior to getting into serious BI development, I was primarily an application developer. This was at a time when agile development was becoming very popular. As part of that, refactoring, test driven ...

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the Columbia Code Camp this weekend, even with the sleet and snow in the area. I had a number of requests for the slides from my presentations, so I’ve uploaded them to my SkyDrive. Introduction to SSIS (SpeakerRate link) Creating Custom Components for SSIS (SpeakerRate link)  (the sample ...

Thanks to the Columbia Enterprise Developer’s Guild for letting me present last night. The audience was great, and I got a lot of good questions. Several people asked if the samples could be made available, and I also had a request to post the slides for some people who weren’t able to make it. So, here they are. I’ve posted them to my SkyDrive ...

It’s a new year, and already a lot going on. The new job is going well, but keeping me extremely busy. I’ve got several upcoming presentations, and there’s a SQL Saturday event planned for Charlotte in March that I’m helping organize. I’m also happy to say that my MVP status was re-awarded for 2010. I have an upcoming presentation at the ...

It’s pretty well accepted that raw files in SSIS are a very fast means of getting data in and out of the pipeline. Jamie Thomson has referenced the use of raw files a number of times and Todd McDermid recently posted about using them for staging data. It occurred to me, that even though I’d always heard they were faster than other options, I’d ...

If you develop custom components for SSIS, you may have the need to update them as you add new functionality. If you are just upgrading the functionality, but not changing the metadata, then you can simply recompile and redeploy the component. An example of this type of update would be changing the component to do additional warning or ...

Below are the basic steps for adding custom components to SSIS; however, for more in-depth information I highly recommend reading Matthew Roche’s post about deploying and testing custom SSIS components. 1. Register the custom assembly in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) Copy the DLL to the c:\windows\assembly\ directory.  Alternatively you ...

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 have the columns in all your tables memorized, and you don’t like typing, so getting a ...

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 Column transformation to introduce the variable’s value into the data flow. However, you need to ...

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 unavailable. I recently needed to upgrade several older packages to SSIS 2008. ...