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 ...

Ever since I started writing SSIS packages back in 2004 I have opted to store configurations in .dtsConfig (.i.e. XML) files rather than in a SQL Server table (aka SQL Server Configurations) however recently I inherited some packages that used SQL Server Configurations and thus had to immerse myself in their murky little world. To all the people ...

Introduction Clem and Jim Bob were out hunting the other day in the woods south of Farmville. As they crossed a ridge, they came upon a big ol' Momma Bear and her cub. The larger bear immediately started towards them. Jim Bob took off running as fast as he could. He stopped when he realized Clem wasn't with him. And when he saw Clem reaching ...

Just finished giving the SSIS High-Performance Dimensional Data Load presentation at SQLSaturday #59 NYC.  Here are the slides in PDF format.  I'll upload the Try-N-Save code and sample data later for attendees to play with. Thanks to everyone who attended my session and thanks to Melissa D. and NJSQL for putting this ...

I have two online classes starting on November 1st that I recorded on the SSWUG.org vClass platform. The first is “Introduction to SQL Server Replication” and is a 12 session class on all things replication. Cost is $199……for more information or to register, click here: http://www.vconferenceonline.com/event/home.aspx?id=107 The second class is ...

In yesterday's blog post Introducing sp_CascadingDataViewer I mentioned that one of the artifacts up at http://cascadingdataviewer.codeplex.com is a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report that visualises the output from sp_CascadingDataViewer and its compatriot sp_CascadingDataViewerTableWrapper. My intended usage for the report ...

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday post is about LOB data http://sqlblog.com/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2010/05/03/t-sql-tuesday-006-what-about-blob.aspx.   For this one I decided to post a sample Tiger/Line SQL database I use all the time in live demos. For those who aren't familiar with it, Tiger/Line data is a dataset published by the U.S. ...

The other day I blogged that the version of the SQL Server PowerShell provider (sqlps) follows the version of PowerShell. That’s all goodness, but it has appeared to cause an issue for PowerShell 2.0. the Get-Command PowerShell command-let returns an error (Object reference not set to an instance of an object) if you are using PowerShell 2.0 and ...

Margarity Kerns recently published a very nice article at SQL Server Central on using hash functions to detect changes in rows during the data warehouse load ETL process.  On the discussion page for the article I noticed a lot of the same old arguments against using hash functions to detect change.  After having this same discussion ...

This post is my entry for Adam Machanic's T-SQL Tuesday #004, hosted this time by Mike Walsh. I was at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week discussing database encryption options in SQL Server 2008 and one question seemed to keep coming up. The question concerns FILESTREAM and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), but first a little ...