What's wrong with the following code?

Read more

When creating a SSRS report, you want to add lines that display trends. You want to show trends for more than one data point. And you want to conditionally format the data point.

In this example, I use Sparklines and a simple expression to create a sparkling report!

Below is… Read more

Most of the scripts I've used to populate date dimension uses a cursor. Since data is loaded only once to a date dimension in the ETL life cycle, using a cursor isn't a sin.

Still, when I was reviewing my own code the other day, I wanted to get rid… Read more

This post is first of yet to come long series on basic concepts of SQL Server. I’ll begin with basic 101 introduction to SQL Server views. I wouldn’t recommend reading any further if you are an experienced sql server’er. I value your time

What are views?

• virtual tables
• named select…

Read more

Standards and best practices are like flu shots you take before you're infected; Database best practices protect your databases from bad things. But, we all make mistakes. It could be because we're on a time crunch, or we're lazy (which I'm guilty of by the way), or maybe it's part… Read more

Query Performance Tuning. Grant Fritchey. $15. If this doesn’t excite you, nothing will. Apress is offering every e-book for just $15 on Nov. 26. Here is a list of books I’m purchasing and recommend to you.

SQL Server 2012 Integration Services Design Patterns

I already bought this, and I love… Read more

I had the pleasure of helping Karla Landrum (@Karlakay22) for the PASS Summit 2012 by creating two dashboards: SQL Saturday events and PASS Chapters on a world map. If you attended either SQL Saturday round table or Community Zone at the Summit, you may have seen them.

I… Read more

As a business intelligence developer, my skills include taking the raw data, shaking it to remove all the junk, and presenting it to business users in the most sexiest way possible – smart people often use the words ETL, and BI to define this process, but I’m not smart –… Read more

What do i mean by shell packages? You’re spot on – that’s an excellent question to begin with. For the purpose of this post, I define shell package as an empty package that is renamed appropriately and contains all the required connection managers.

It is a common pattern among SSIS… Read more

I really wanted to attent PASS Summit this year, I’ve never attended before. I was preparing myself mentally since the last summit, but things didn’t work out. Life happened. I’ve some personal obligations that I need to take care. I can’t talk much about these obligations here, but I can… Read more

If you are trying to generate Uniqueidentifier/Newid() in SSIS data flow, you will soon realize that there is no out-of-the-box transformation you could use. Fear not. Script Component can be used to create Uniqueidentifier columns.

In the below package, I’ve an OLE DB source. Then, i dragged script component to… Read more

This book is written by Andy Leonard, Matt Masson, Tim Mitchell, Jessica Moss, and Michelle Ufford. These are all highly talented people we are talking about. Andy is constantly teaching SSIS patterns in his training classes and articles. Matt, for me, is the face of SSIS team at Microsoft. Same… Read more

Today I’m sharing another script that I often find useful – Queries to find the count of rows from tables and views in a SQL Server database.

Count Rows In All Tables:

This query returns the count of rows from all tables in a database. The results can be seen… Read more

Apparently, SQL Saturday isn’t popular in the west. See for yourself. I wanted to see what cities frequently host SQL Saturday and ended up creating this dashboard. There are some interesting findings. Look at how the events are primarily confined to only (right) half of United States. There are several… Read more

I’m having a little fun with documenting basic information about indexes in my current project. I’m posting the scripts here mostly for me to come back when I need them in the future, but hopefully some of you might find them useful.

Find tables without any index:

This script… Read more

MaxConcurrentExecutables, a package level property in SSIS determines the number of control flow items that can be executed in parallel. The default value is -1. This is equivalent to number of processors (logical and physical) plus 2.

For example, in the below package running on my machine with 4 processors… Read more

A surrogate key is an auto generated value, usually integer, in the dimension table. It is made the primary key of the table and is used to join a dimension to a fact table. Among other benefits, surrogate keys allow you to maintain history in a dimension table. Despite of… Read more

I occasionally review the search terms people use to get to this blog and secretly celebrate knowing my post helped them. If i know it didn’t, i add it to the list of items i should write about. This post is a result of one such thing.

Note: If you… Read more

Topic for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Aaron Nelson (@SQLVariant) is Logging.

I like to think of logging as a Flight Data Recorder (FDR) to an aircraft. FDR records data about functioning of an aircraft. No one cares what is in there as long as the aircraft… Read more

As I learnt a few things about blogging, I made a list of tips to get better at blogging. Thought I would share.

1. Pour your heart out to answer a question. When someone asks a question, it means they followed your post hoping they would find an answer to…

Read more