I’m happy to announce that I have been selected to present at the SQL PASS Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina this October. I’ll be delivering a session entitled “Data Cleansing in SQL Server Integration Services”, in which I’ll cover various ways to detect and cleanse dirty data using tools built into (or accessible from) SQL Server Integration Services. This will…
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be doing a tour of the 4 SQL Server user groups in central Colorado next week. I’ll be speaking at these four user groups: Monday (3/18): Northern Colorado Database Professionals Tuesday (3/19): Boulder SQL Server User Group Wednesday (3/20): Colorado Springs SQL Server User Group Thursday (3/21): Denver SQL Server User Group At each…
Since the release of Visual Studio 2012, business intelligence developers have been limited in how much they could use this tool due to the fact that it did not support BI project types (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS). Today, that limitation is now gone with the release by Microsoft of SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012. …
Note: This will be the first post in a short series on using object typed variables (also known as SSIS object variables) in SQL Server Integration Services. When defining variables in SSIS, the ETL developer has several data type options to choose from depending on the information to be stored in each variable. Included in the options are String, Boolean,…
Since I started regularly attending SQL Saturday events some five years ago, I’ve sat in on a number of professional development sessions by Andy Warren, Buck Woody, Don Gabor, and others. Each one offered different bits of advice based on his or her own experience, but there was an overriding theme in all of them: Don’t wait until you need…
I’m going to Nottingham, England, fabled home of Robin Hood, where I’m going to eat fish and chips and talk about SSIS. How’s that for tying seemingly unrelated topics together? I’m happy to report that in addition to my full-day preconference seminar at SQLBits, I’ll also be delivering a regular session entitled Cleaning Up Dirty Data with SSIS on Friday,…
I’m happy to announce that I’ve been selected to deliver a full day of training at the upcoming SQLBits conference in Nottingham, England. This will be my first time taking part in SQLBits (in fact, it will be my first trip to the U.K.) and I’m very much looking forward to the experience. I’ll be delivering a full day presentation…
OK, I’m not really going to break it. I’m just going to beat it up a little bit. This Thursday evening, I’ll be working my home turf at the North Texas SQL Server User Group monthly meeting, presenting “When ETL Goes Bad: Handling Errors and Anomalies in SSIS” at 6:15 at the Microsoft campus. In this hour-long presentation, I’ll go…
Frequently I am asked how to properly use SQL Server Integration Services to handle ragged flat files, an example of which is shown below. In this small sample file, you can see that we are dealing with medical data with an inconsistent format. As shown, the rows in the pipe-delimited file can have as few as seven and as many…
With the year 2012 now in the rear view mirror, and while I’m still in the midst of my holiday vacation (two whole weeks! Feels very strange…) , I thought I’d take stock of my tasks and accomplishments of the past year. Sharing knowledge I must sound like a broken record when I say this, but I feel incredibly honored…