Creating Your First Azure Data Factory

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

Azure Data Factory has grown in both popularity and utility in the past several years. It has evolved beyond its significant limitations in its initial version, and is quickly...

2020-09-08 (first published: 2020-08-28)

415 reads

My New Favorite Demo Dataset: Dunder Mifflin Data

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

Those of us who write technical articles and deliver technical presentations are always on the lookout for the perfect data set for demonstration and testing. Microsoft has done a...

2020-08-17 (first published: 2020-08-06)

504 reads

The What, Why, When, and How of Incremental Loads

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

When moving data in an extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) process, the most efficient design pattern is to touch only the data you must, copying just the data that...

2020-08-05 (first published: 2020-07-23)

507 reads

Reusing a Recordset in an SSIS Object Variable

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

A few years back, I wrote a blog post about using an SSIS object variable as a data flow source. In that post, I described how you could load...

2020-07-30

3 reads

Comparing SSIS and Azure Data Factory

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

For the better part of 15 years, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has been the go-to enterprise extract-transform-load (ETL) tool for shops running on Microsoft SQL Server. More recently,...

2020-07-28 (first published: 2020-07-16)

577 reads

SSIS Parameters

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

SSIS parameters help to ease the process of passing runtime values to SSIS packages. For values that can change over time, using parameters in SSIS is an ideal means...

2020-07-14 (first published: 2020-07-02)

436 reads

The SSIS Catalog: Install, Manage, Secure, and Monitor your Enterprise ETL Infrastructure

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

I’m happy to announce the publication of my latest book. The SSIS Catalog: Install, Manage, Secure, and Monitor your Enterprise ETL Infrastructure is now available on Amazon in both...

2020-07-13

Secure Your Data Prep Area

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

I’ve been building ETL processes for many years, and I’ve learned two universal truths: data preparation is messy, and you must always secure your data prep area. A data...

2020-06-18

1 reads

Lessons from Iowa’s Caucus Debacle

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

Earlier this week, the state of Iowa held its caucuses to choose each political party’s nominee for November’s presidential election. Being the first state in each election cycle to...

2020-02-11 (first published: 2020-02-06)

778 reads

Checking SSIS Variable Values During Runtime

• by Tim Mitchell

• Tim Mitchell

As anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis knows, I’m a big fan of using dynamic configurations, including SSIS parameters variables, to make my ETL architectures as...

2020-01-03 (first published: 2019-12-21)

891 reads