In his article Healthcare's Big Problem With Little Data, author Dan Munro raises salient points about the state of health-related data. Electronic Health Records (EHR) were promoted as the end-all-be-all solution for the industry – a standardization that, I suppose, many thought would organically and naturally occur, stabilize, and be ...

Earlier today I posted the following question on Twitter: Foreign keys in a data warehouse. Yes or no? This discussion is looming at work, i know my position but am interested in what others think. (https://twitter.com/jamiet/status/324215986729385986) Specifically, I wanted to know if people were in favour of creating foreign keys ...

Join Darryll Petrancuri and I as we present Loading Data Warehouse Partitions with SSIS 2012 Saturday 8 Dec 2012 at SQL Saturday 173 in DC! SQL Server 2012 table partitions offer powerful Big Data solutions to the Data Warehouse ETL Developer. In this presentation, Darryll Petrancuri and Andy Leonard demonstrate one approach to loading ...

For the past two years, I have had the honor and privilege or authoring SSIS Design Patterns alongside Jessica Moss, Michelle Ufford, Tim Mitchell, and Matt Masson. Publication of the book – like many projects of this scope – has been delayed. The current publication date is 27 Aug 2012 and I have high confidence in this date. I take ...

Those who are familiar with Ralph Kimball’s theories on data warehousing modelling may be familiar with his assertion that a type 2 dimension member record should have a StartDate and an EndDate that defines the effective period of that record. He outlines this approach in his paper Slowly Changing Dimensions, Types 2 & 3 from the October 2008 ...

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 becomes useful is in a retail environment where the retailer uses a customer loyalty card that ...

They call it their new, massively scalable data warehousing solution; they say it can load 1TB per hour and support data warehouses in the petabyte range, all on commodity hardware.  Bold claims, for sure, and I bet you're thinking, ''I'll believe it when I see it.'' If you can get on Microsoft's TAP list (TAP = Technical Adoption Program) ...

Go to File Gallery to Download Building a Data Warehouse: With Examples in SQL Server describes how to build a data warehouse completely from scratch and shows practical examples on how to do it. Author Vincent Rainardi also describes some practical issues he has experienced that developers are likely to encounter in their first data warehousing ...

Long gone are the days when you can reasonably expect to know all aspects of SQL Server at a deep level.  When a new version starts to emerge, I try to put some scope around the features that I will dive more deeply into.  I'm publishing my list here so that like-minded SQL Server enthusiasts may become aware of a feature or ...