Today I was using a 3rd Party Data Flow component that has several Custom Properties for which I need to change some of their values at runtime using a DTS Expression. To mimic the situation let’s use the “Percentage Sampling” that has two Custom Properties: Of the two Custom Properties only some (one in this case) are available also outside ...

Today I’ve released the first Service Pack of DTLoggedExec (for those who doesn’t know what it is: DTLoggedExec is a DTExec replacement to run Integration Services packages): http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com This Service Pack fixes some little problems with the .bat and .sql files that comes with DTLoggedExec. All the fixes were already ...

Currently you may have code that makes decisions based on sys.databases.database_id or the built-in DB_ID() function. I have seen a lot of code out there that checks the database_id, and behaves differently based on the assumption that a value between 1 and 4 (as well as 32,767 - the resource database) means it is a system database, and anything ...

I’m very happy to announce that my proposal for the Spotlight session I’ve been invited to deliver at PASS 2011 has been accepted! Temporal Snapshot Fact Table You are designing a BI Solution and your customer ask you to keep a snapshot of the status of all their documents (orders, insurances, contracts, bills...whatever the word ...

SSIS Package Configurations are very useful to make packages flexible so that you can change objects properties at run-time and thus make the package configurable without having to open and edit it. In a complex scenario where you have dozen of packages (even in in the smallest BI project I worked on I had 50 packages), each package may have its ...

Today I've relased the latest version of my DTExec replacement tool, DTLoggedExec. The main changes are the following: Used a new strategy for version numbers. Now it will follow the following pattern Major.Minor.TargetSQLServerVersion.Revision Added support for Auto Configurations Fixed a bug that reported incorrect number of errors ...

PASS Summit 2010 Pre & Post conference are out! This year I’ll deliver the “Creating BI Solution from A to Z” seminar in which, as the title implies, attendees will see how to create a BI solution starting from scratch. Going through the dimensional modeling and the creation of the Datawarehouse, the implementation of the ETL process with ...

Thanks to my friend's Doug blog I’ve found a very nice tool made by fellow MVP Darren Green which really helps to make SSIS develoepers life easier: http://expressioneditor.codeplex.com/Wikipage?ProjectName=expressioneditor In brief the tool allow the testing of SSIS Expression so that one can evaluate and test them before using in SSIS ...

When you install SQL 2008 R2 workstation components you get a newer version of BIDS (BI Developer Studio, included in the workstation components) that replaces BIDS 2008 version (BIDS 2005 still live side-by-side). Everything would be good if you can use the newer version to edit any 2008 AND 2008R2 project. SSIS editor doesn't offer a way to set ...

After serveral years of development I’ve finally released the first non-beta version of DTLoggedExec! I’m now very confident that the product is stable and solid and has all the feature that are important to have (at least for me). DTLoggedExec 1.0 http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/44689 Here’s the release notes: FIRST ...