When you install the database projects template of SSDT you get SQL Server Object Explorer (SSOX) installed as well. SSOX is a pane within Visual Studio and is the main enabler of the Connected Development experience that the SSDT team have attempted to provide. SSOX provides some really cool capabilities that are not in SQL Server Management ...

Since the release of SQL Server 2012 I have become a big fan of using dacpacs for deploying SQL Server databases (for reasons that I will explain some other day) and I chose to use a dacpac to distribute my recently announced utility sp_ssiscatalog (read: Introducing sp_ssiscatalog (v1.0.0.0)). Unfortunately if you read that blog post you may have ...

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 ...

This is a heads-up for anyone doing development on SSIS. On my current project where we are implementing a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012 solution we recently encountered a situation where we were unable to deploy any of our projects even though we had successfully deployed in the past. Any attempt to use the deployment wizard ...

I have been using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) both at work and on some hobby projects for quite a few weeks now and of all the new features I have to say the one that I am appreciating the most is Publish Profile files. I have been searching around on MSDN for an article that explains Publish Profile files but it seems no such article exists so ...

A mountain of SQL Server 2012 video content featuring Greg Low, Jonathan Kehayias, Joe Sack and Roger Doherty has just been released on Channel 9. Channel 9 has great support for tags and RSS feeds so if you want to automatically download all of that content simply you can add the following RSS feed: ...

I have been poking around idly in the RC0 release of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012 and noticed a few nice enhancements that hadn’t really hit the newsstands as yet (well, I didn’t know about them anyway). Here is a quick rundown: Expression is viewable in the Variables window Fairly self-explanatory this one. If a variable ...

Over the past few years of using datadude (aka DBPro aka Visual Studio Database Projects) I have fallen prey to a peculiar little nuance – if you forget to supply a value for a sqlcmd variable then it will simply use a default and often that is not the desired behaviour. Hence why yesterday I submitted the following suggestion to ...

Its no great secret that Juneau, a collection of features in the forthcoming SQL Server codenamed Denali, will be in the next version of Visual Studio but its nice to have it confirmed all the same. I have installed the first publicly available drop of that next version (known as Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, download from here) that was ...

In December 2010 I announced in a blog post Introducing SSIS Reporting Pack for SQL Server code-named Denali that I planned to provide a series of reports that visualised information held in the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server Denali – I called these reports the SSIS Reporting Pack. At that time SSIS Reporting Pack was a precursor to what I really ...