A couple of times over the past few months, while in Visual Studio 2008 working on an SSIS package, I went to the toolbox and saw this message:

There we no tools at all showing up.  Apparently the toolbox became corrupted, but fortunately it is easy to fix.  Here were… Read more

When doing ETL, you have the choice of using T-SQL or SSIS.  What things should you consider when deciding which one to use?  Here are some of the major design considerations to think about:

• Performance - With T-SQL, everything is processed within the SQL engine.  With SSIS, you…

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Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), formally called by its code name “Project Madison”, is an edition of Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 R2 that was released in December 2010.  PDW is Microsoft’s reworking of the DatAllegro Inc. massive parallel processing (MPP) product that Microsoft acquired in July… Read more

This is a bit off-topic, but I wanted to mention a great tool for beginners to learn how to program.  This tool is especially ideal for those of us who have high schoolers who are interested in programming (this blog is directed at my son James).  Small Basic 1.0 was… Read more

On a few occasions, I have opened up my PerformancePoint scorecard on SharePoint to see an error staring at me:

So two of my KPI’s, which have been working fine for months, suddenly don’t work.  Follow along and I will quickly show you how I found the problem.  First, I… Read more

Source tables change over time. A data mart or data warehouse that is based on those tables needs to reflect these changes.  This blog post will explain different solutions for solving this problem.

When moving data into a data warehouse, taking it from a source system is the first step… Read more

Microsoft SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service that is part of the recently released Microsoft Office 365.  For those of us who have installed SharePoint and maintained it, we know there is a lot of cost and overhead.  Setting it all up and maintaining it can be a real… Read more

If you are using a SSIS lookup transformation editor and the reference dataset is large (millions of rows) and you are using “Full cache” on the lookup transformation (the default), you might run into a problem.  With this setting the rows will all be loaded into memory, and with so… Read more

There is a very interesting new Microsoft program that started back in January, called the SSAS Maestro Program.  It is a five-day, deep-dive course on Analysis Services 2008 R2 that gives architects and consultants the education and hands-on experience needed to deliver the highly complex and highest scalable OLAP solutions.… Read more

Released today, the SQL Server code name ‘Denali’ Community Technical Preview 3 (CTP3) Product Guide download contains the latest datasheets, white papers, click-through and auto-running demonstrations, hands-on lab previews, technical presentations, and other useful links to help you evaluate the SQL Server code name ‘Denali’ CTP3 release.  Download it here Read more

Replaying multiple threads of a captured trace in SQL Profiler is difficult, and you are limited to replaying the workload from a single computer.  Distributed Replay is a new multi-threaded replay utility in Denali that solves this problem by allowing you to spread the workload of a trace against multiple… Read more

For those of you who use MDX, I’m sure you share my opinion that MDX is a lot harder to master than SQL.  One trick I have learned is that instead of trying to write MDX from scratch, use one of the following tools to build the MDX for you: Read more

I take it for granted that everyone knows all about Microsoft certifications and Microsoft MVP’s.  But a few years ago, I had no idea what they were.  I had seen a few people list Microsoft certifications on their résumé, but I really did not know much about them, and I… Read more

As a consultant or contractor, many times the client we are at does not provide us with a laptop, so we must use our own.  Usually that is preferred anyway, as we have all the software and tools installed and setup the way we want to make us as productive… Read more

Project Apollo is a new feature in CTP3 of SQL Server Denali that enables a new columnstore index that offers 10-100x performance improvements for a star join or similar query.  Apollo brings together the in-memory columnstore technology (VertiPaq) that is used in PowerPivot and a new query execution paradigm called… Read more