Shuttle Endeavor last mission STS-134: I felt the shockwave

I witnessed a piece of history today at 8:56am; the last voyage of shuttle Endeavor on its STS-134 mission. It was...

T-SQL: Identifying, inserting and removing spaces in strings

Frequently, when working with strings you will need to identify, insert or remove spaces before, after or in between characters.
For example, you may...

T-SQL UPPER(): Change an all lowercase string to uppercase

The T-SQL UPPER() command allows you to change a lowercase string to an uppercase string.
For example, it will allow you to change the word...

T-SQL LOWER(): Change an all uppercase string to lower case

The T-SQL LOWER() command allows you to change an uppercase string to a lowercase string.
For example, it will allow you to change the word...

Word Macro to load a Data Warehouse

Recently I came across a very specific requirement for a Data Warehouse project for one of our customers. Due to...

SSAS errors: Errors in the metadata manager. The dimension with ID of ‘xxx’ referenced by the ‘yyy’ cube, does not exist.

When deploying or processing a cube or dimension you may encounter an error similar to this:

Errors in the metadata manager. The...

SSIS Foreach File Enumerator returns more files than expected by appending a wildcard (*) to the file mask

While working on a recent project for a customer that involved importing both Excel 97-2003 and Excel 2007/2010 files, I was...

Differences between Merge and Union All transformations in SSIS

 What are the differences between Merge and Union All transformations in SSIS ?
 The first and most obvious difference is that Merge...