October 2009 - Posts

• Deploying Reporting Services reports using msbuild

  On Thursday (29/10/09) evening I did a presentation at the London SQL Server User Group entitled “Deploying Reporting Services reports using msbuild” and I promised that I would make the demo material available. If you’re interested, read on… The demo Read More... Posted Saturday, October 31, 2009 9:12 AM by jamiet | 18 Comments

• London SQL Server User Group - 29th October 2009, 1800

  Just a quick post. This evening I am presenting at the London SQL Server User Group which is being hosted at Microsoft's offices in London Victoria, click here for more details (agenda, directions etc...). If you're nearby come along, bring your friends, Read More... Posted Thursday, October 29, 2009 7:09 PM by jamiet | 2 Comments Filed under: User Group

• FYI: A new barrier to SQL Azure adoption

  On their recent blog post Updated CTP for SQL Azure Database includes complete feature set for PDC 2009! the SQL Azure team outlined a new feature: Firewall Support – The new firewall features allows a customer to specify an allow list of IP address that Read More... Posted Monday, October 26, 2009 4:37 PM by jamiet | 14 Comments Filed under: SQL Azure, sql server

• Microsoft Semantic Engine

  Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is happening next month. I’m not going unfortunately however they do post recordings of all the sessions online so I spent some time today browsing the list of sessions to see if anything took my fancy Read More... Posted Monday, October 19, 2009 9:50 PM by jamiet | 5 Comments Filed under: Microsoft, Semantic Engine, sql server

• Collecting information about your SSIS packages [SSIS Nugget]

  Did you know that is is possible to read the contents of a SSIS package (i.e. a .dtsx file) from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) using T-SQL? For example, take the following T-SQL snippet: select cast (BulkColumn as XML) from openrowset ( bulk Read More... Posted Sunday, October 18, 2009 11:08 PM by jamiet | 32 Comments Filed under: nugget, sql server integration services, ssis, SSISPackageStatsCollector, t-sql, XML, XPath, xquery

• Considering surrogate keys for Unknown members

  All data warehouses have the notion of an Unknown member somewhere in their make-up. That is, a dimension member to which we can map fact records when the member that we need to map to is, well, unknown. The canonical example of where the Unknown member Read More... Posted Wednesday, October 14, 2009 11:35 PM by jamiet | 15 Comments Filed under: data warehousing, surrogate keys

• Things you might not know about Precedence Constraints : SSIS Nugget

  Precedence constraints are one of the most oft used features of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) but also often one of the most overlooked. In this blog post I’ll cover a couple of things that you might not know about them. The basics Most people Read More... Posted Sunday, October 11, 2009 12:11 AM by jamiet | 15 Comments Filed under: nugget, precedence constraints, sql server, sql server integration services, ssis