Occasionally, I’ll stumble across one of those neat tricks that makes me ask myself, “Why didn’t I know about this years ago?”. This was one such discovery, and has been a huge time saver for me. Vertical Text Selection in SSMS Typically, selecting blocks of text is done in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom order. If you use your mouse to select…
I’m old enough to remember when multitasking was considered a good thing. From the same mouths that brought you “work smarter, not harder” came the advice to always be working on multiple things at once to improve efficiency. However, we’ve since learned that deep focus is more serial than parallel, and that trying to focus on multiple things at once…
The weather is turning cooler, there is holiday music everywhere, and the relatives are all excited to get together and talk about politics. That can only mean one thing: it’s almost time for Festivus! For the last three years, I have spent the 11 days leading up to Festivus writing a blog post each day, and I’m delighted to continue…
Today is the first full day of the PASS Summit, and this morning we kicked things off with a 2-hour opening ceremony and keynote. Networking and Growth PASS president Grant Fritchey starts things off appropriately by focusing on networking and career growth. We say it every year, but it bears repeating: the most important thing you’ll get out of being…
When working in the SSIS data flow, you’ll notice that many sources and transformations and some destinations have a built-in output to handle errors. The error output allows the SSIS developer to create a separate path through which error rows can be directed. In this SSIS Basics post, we’ll briefly discuss the essentials and design patterns for using SSIS error…
Data exploration is an essential piece of any new ETL (extraction-transformation-load) process. Knowing the structure, type, and even the semantics of data sources can help the ETL developer or architect to make better decisions on data type and length settings, transformation logic, and error handling procedures. Additionally, there are situations in which the exploration of the data is the principal…
In SQL Server Integration Services, connection managers are used as gateways for most any external read and write operation. Connection managers are type- and format-specific, and in the case of relational database connection managers, they are usually specific to vendor (Oracle, DB2, etc.) as well. In most use cases, the same connection will be used across multiple packages in the…
SQL Server Integration Services is equipped with tasks and containers to make it easy to design and maintain the flow of ETL: which logic should be executed, when should it be executed, and how many times should it occur. Most SSIS developers are familiar with the sequence container and the For Each Loop container, which can be used to group…
In SQL Server Integration Services, the lookup component is one of the most frequently used tools for data validation and completion. The lookup component is provided as a means to virtually join one set of data to another to validate and/or retrieve missing values. Properly configured, it is reliable and reasonably fast. To get the most out of this component,…
SQL Server Integration Services does a great job of retrieving and processing data on the fly, directly in the data flow pipeline. However, there are circumstances that occasionally require the persistence of result sets in SSIS for use during package execution. For these such cases, one option is to use SSIS raw files. In this SSIS Basics post, I will…