Agile BI Community

I’ll be presenting a couple of sessions at the Carolina Code Camp on Saturday, May 15th. This will be my second time presenting at the Carolina Code Camp, and I’m looking forward to it. Last time, I had great audience participation, and the event was well organized and fun. I’ll be presenting on “Processing Flat Files with SSIS” at 8:45 AM and ...

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 ...

I’m going to be presenting two sessions at the SQL Server Best Practices Conference on August 24-26 in Washington, DC. This conference has a different focus than many of the technical conferences that I’ve presented at in the past. Instead of technical deep dives, the focus is on providing attendees with information on the decision points they are ...

David Reed, who manages the SQL Server community samples on CodePlex, has been running a SQL Heroes contest. It’s for open source applications that help improve the SQL Server experience. You can read more about it on the SQL Heroes blog. I find myself in the interesting position of having two horses in the race: BIDS Helper (with Greg Galloway ...

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 ...

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 an honor). I'll be presenting on configurations in SSIS, unit testing SSIS (one of my favorite ...

I've been a bit lax posting on my blogs and the MSDN forums recently. Fortunately, I have a good reason (at least I think it's a good one). :) My employer, Mariner, has graciously given me permission to open source a unit testing framework for SSIS packages. Preparing it for release has taken a bit more time than I expected, as I wanted to polish ...

I'd put in a request for additional support for unit testing in Integration Services on Connect (https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=276292). Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it will make the cut for SQL Server 2008. I used automated unit testing extensively when I was more focused on application ...