Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today’s economy and business environment poses problems for many IT departments. Budgets are tight, companies are looking for ways to reduce headcount, and strategic investments are not very popular right now. Instead, companies are focusing on projects that have immediate … Continue reading →

We encountered an issue recently in an ETL process during the extract portion. When extracting from one very large table, using a NOLOCK hint, we were encountering errors indicating that the data was changing while we were extracting it. Since … Continue reading →

If you follow business intelligence news at all, then you probably saw the news from Microsoft last week that PerformancePoint is becoming a component of SharePoint. However, it won’t be all of PerformancePoint – the Plan portion will see one … Continue reading →

When I originally started this blog, I wanted to cover agile development in BI/DW projects, as well as technical topics about BI. However, it didn’t work out quite that way. I’ve posted a few thing here and there about agile … Continue reading →

As I mentioned in my previous post, defining an appropriate scope is difficult when you are attempting to do iterative development on BI/DW projects. The problems with this are not unique to BI/DW projects, of course. All projects have scope … Continue reading →

The launch event in Charlotte went very well – we had over 100 people in attendance, and the sessions were packed. We had a lot of good information on the new features in SQL Server 2008, covering the new T-SQL … Continue reading →

I’m a fan of agile development. Prior to focusing on business intelligence and data warehousing, I architected and developed client server and n-tier applications, and I found that agile development techniques delivered better end results. I believe that, in large … Continue reading →

There is a SQL Server 2008 Firestarter event at the Charlotte Microsoft campus next Thursday, January 15th. If you want to learn more about the new features in 2008, or just get a chance to network, it’s a great opportunity. … Continue reading →

I was processing a SSAS database to test some aggregations today, and I noticed some errors and came across some unexpected behavior.  When I was processing the User dimension (among others), I got an error similar to the following: Errors … Continue reading →

This is a little off of my usual SSIS posts, but I ran across an interesting item. It’s probably well-known to people who work with format strings on a regular basis. However, I’ve used them for a while, and just … Continue reading →