ETL Antipattern: Start With Writing Code
In this first post in my series on ETL Antipatterns, I’m going to discuss one of the most common missteps when building an extract-transform-load (ETL) process: jumping straight into...
2020-12-12
24 reads
Tim Mitchell
The Eleven Days of Festivus 2020
We’re rounding the corner to the second half of December, which means it’s time for my favorite holiday: Festivus! Like many of you, I enjoy gathering around the Festivus...
2020-12-12
3 reads
Creating Your First Azure Data Factory
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)
499 reads
My New Favorite Demo Dataset: Dunder Mifflin Data
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)
653 reads
Reusing a Recordset in an SSIS Object Variable
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
231 reads
The What, Why, When, and How of Incremental Loads
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)
557 reads
Comparing SSIS and Azure Data Factory
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)
721 reads
The SSIS Catalog: Install, Manage, Secure, and Monitor your Enterprise ETL Infrastructure
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
43 reads
SSIS Parameters
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)
477 reads
Secure Your Data Prep Area
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
2 reads
Blogs
The Evolution of Data: From Databases to Spark to Lakebases
By Daniel Janik
The circle cylinder of life Maybe you’ve noticed all the twenty somethings tight rolling...
Why Microsoft Fabric Signals the Next Wave of Data Strategy
By Chris Yates
In today’s data-driven economy, organizations are no longer asking if they should invest in...
PostgreSQL Timeline: History and Evolution
By Rohit Garg
PostgreSQL, often referred to as Postgres, is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system that...
Forums
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How to fix transactional replication latency
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Life's Little Frustrations
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Question of the Day
The Updated Columns List
I have this table in SQL Server 2022:
CREATE TABLE CustomerLarge (CustomerID INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1) CONSTRAINT CustomerLargePK PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED , CustomerName VARCHAR(20) , CustomerContactFirstName VARCHAR(40) , CustomerContactLastName VARCHAR(40) , Address VARCHAR(20) , Address2 VARCHAR(20) , City VARCHAR(20) , CountryCode CHAR(3) , Postal VARCHAR(20) ) GOIf I check the columns_updated() function return in a trigger, what is the data returned? See possible answers