One very useful usage of Extended Events is the ability to trap SQL Server error without the need to have a server trace running (which, btw, is deprecated), with the additional feature of being able to query the data as soon as it comes in. This means that we a solution to monitor and trap errors as soon as they happen can be easily created, in ...

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 ...

In the last days I needed a quick and efficient way to monitor the performance of a job and of each step over time. There’s a lot of interesting data in MSDB database and the various sysjob tables, but the stored data is not really easy to use outside the Management Studio. Date and Time are not stored as date/time data type, there is no easy way ...

From time to time happens that I need to extract metadata informations from Analysis Services DMVS in order to quickly get an overview of the entire situation and/or drill down to detail level. As a memo I post the link I use most when need to get documentation on SSAS Objects Data DMVs: SSAS: Using DMV Queries to get Cube Metadata ...

I’ve released couple of hours ago the SP2 of my DTLoggedExec tool. For those who don’t know it, it’s a DTEXEC replacement, useful to execute SSIS and having logging provided right from the engine and not from the package itself. More info can be found here: http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/ This SP2 release add an important feature to the CSV ...

I’ve updated my SYS2 scripts: Added a new script to see how much buffer cache memory is used by each database Updated the sys2.stats script in order to have only one row per statistics Updated the sys2.query_stats script to use the sys.dm_exec_plan_attributes dmv to get better information on which database was used by the cached plans ...

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 ...

I’ve just released three new scripts of my “sys2” script collection that can be found on CodePlex: Project Page: http://sys2dmvs.codeplex.com/ Source Code Download: http://sys2dmvs.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/57732 The three new scripts are the following sys2.database_backup_info.sql sys2.query_memory_grants.sql ...

On the next 20th Semptember I’ll deliver a session on a topic that is IMHO really important but is not yet covered enough: Adaptive BI: Engineering a BI Solution Are you starting to create a BI solution....but where do you begin with? How to setup everything correctly so that you'll be able to handle new features required by the customers ...

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 ...