Previously I wrote a blog on how to do a for each loop to look through each col in an SSIS data flow here. Well things have changed since I wrote that blog, in fact I believe that old  code only works in SSIS 2005. So I thought I… Read more

There is no native function built in to SSIS to get the previous row in the data flow. But with a little work you can do this and make it perform much better than a SQL cursor and you don’t have to use the dreadfully slow OLEDB Command transform.
In… Read more

I made it to Cambridge and actually feel OK. I wonder how I’ll feel tomorrow, but the two day adjustment worked well. Tuesday I woke up at 5:30, and around 4:30 Wednesday before leaving for London. I flew late in the day, a 3:00 flight to Calgary, easily cleared customs… Read more

This is something I saw recently, a large chalkboard – like the kind they used to have in schools – on a hallway at a client. People come by and write notes. I’ve seen a countdown to the holidays, reminders to work together, things about upcoming games, and more. Occasionally… Read more

Just had a pleasurable 5 hours watching the Autumn countryside go by on a glorious sunny day (in fact its warmer at the end of September than it was for most of July and August).

Where am I heading you ask? Liverpool the home of the Beatles, the Mersey Ferry… Read more

A couple weeks ago a user complained that on one of our development databases, one of the views he was linking to via Access was missing some of the columns.  There were no permissions issues and the columns all showed up properly if they looked at the view via SSMS;… Read more

When you have a disaster, the time that you have to restore service is usually referred to as the RTO time. This stands for the Recovery Time Objective and it can is defined like this in Wikipedia:

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a… Read more

This is post is going to be very simple but it is something I come across ever so often and find myself having to look up the syntax most of the time.  I guess it is one of those things that if you don’t use it often enough you don’t… Read more

The Merge component in SSIS will take two sorted sources and union them while maintaining the original sort order. The question arises, what about duplicate records. These duplicates do not get eliminated.

Here are two tables with the ID 5 and the name Brian repeated on each.

 
Here is… Read more

As a consultant or contractor, you can sometimes be faced with the decision when taking a new contract of whether to go 1099 or W-2.  Essentially, the question is in what manner will you be paid by your client.  Having faced that decision a few times myself, I will fill… Read more

Calling all SQL peeps in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Omaha,…!

It’s time for another SQL Saturday at the beautiful University of Iowa campus.

The speaker lineup looks great.

I’ll be there presenting on the SSIS Script Task.

There will be more SSIS goodness presented by Ted Krueger and… Read more

Managing large SQL Server inventories requires standardisation. Do your research , create the scripts , and apply.

Occasionally, custom changes are required . This should be after careful testing.

One advantage of standardising is  for  Disaster Recovery. The rebuild is in the scripts.

If full server rebuilds are required… Read more

I just wanted to do a quick post to let everyone know that I am in fact going to be posting the follow up content that I promised in my webinar and at SQL Saturday.  It has been a busy busy week and I just haven’t had the time to… Read more

G’day,

I’m probably not the only one that has noticed that as the volume of data gets bigger in out databases, the time taken to preform maintenance increases.

This seems to be a simple fact of life for the DBA. But as our maintenance time increases, we need to be… Read more

It’s an interesting article on how to pay people from Dan Ariely at Business Week. It’s a look at some of the issues with paying for knowledge work, or work that isn’t well defined. The short version is that you don’t want to specify too tightly what you expect people… Read more

When I get in to work in the morning, I like a good cup of coffee waiting for me, a neck rub, and all my favorite programs open and waiting for me.  Since the first two seem out of the question, I focus on the third.

I’ve automated my start-of-day… Read more

If you have a parent package that is looping through a set of files and calling child packages and want the parent package to continue even if the child package fails, there is a little work involved in making this happen.
In this example I have a parent package that… Read more

I finally found the time to work through the questions from the 24 Hours of PASS session that I did. Thanks to everyone that attended the event

Q1: Can you filter execution plans for sort warnings?

No. The sort and hash warnings don’t appear in the execution plan. You’d have… Read more

Well, it’s official.  I am a Data Head.  It doesn’t change too much my level of geekiness.  But I may have to rethink one of the answers given during that interview.

The Data Head profiles are being done by a training company called Data Education.  The company is another… Read more

In just a few short days, it will be time for SQL Saturday #98 in Iowa City.  If you’ve got some free time this coming Saturday and are within driving distance– take the time now to register and come get some free training.

While you are there, think about stepping… Read more