Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 on … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →