Iterating Through Excel Worksheets with Biml

Wrangling large or complex Excel workbooks in SSIS can be a challenge. From managing data types (more about that in this post by Koen Verbeeck) to addressing multiple worksheets in a single document, configuring SSIS to properly read from or write to Excel documents is tedious at best. While there are no silver bullets to completely solve these problems, I’ve…


On Failure: Getting Up

In my continuing series entitled “On Failure”, I want to talk about skiing. I’m not a great skier. It would probably be a stretch to say that I’m a good skier. Still, I enjoy doing it, and I want to (and can) get better at it. Since I live in the Dallas area, I don’t get a lot of opportunities…


Advanced SSIS Training in Dallas

I’m very excited to offer a new course entitled “Advanced SSIS” in the Dallas area this spring. My friend and colleague Andy Leonard and I will be delivering this new 3-day course March 9-11, 2015 at the Microsoft offices in Irving, Texas. This course is intended for those who have experience using Integration Services who are looking to take their…


On Failure

The first rule of blogging is that you should write about topics you know a lot about. And I know a lot about failure. This post will be the first in a series on the topic, through which I’ll share a few of my own failures and how I’ve done my best to use them to my benefit. In almost…


Six practical tips for social media success

Social media is the new résumé.  In many ways, it’s even better than a résumé – a person’s social media stream can reveal attitudes, biases, and deficiencies that wouldn’t dare appear on a résumé.  Your online thoughts – blogs, Instagram pictures, tweets on Twitter, posts on Facebook, among others – help to make up the digital you, which friends and…


On Perspective

Perspective can make or break a career.  Maintaining a proper perspective is very often the differentiating factor between a good technologist and an incredible one. In my 15-ish years in IT, I’ve said a lot of dumb things.  Many of them I’ve forgotten, but I can’t shake the memory of one particular phrase I uttered more than a few times…


SSIS Parent-Child Architecture in Catalog Deployment Mode

This is the third in a series of posts about SSIS parent-child architecture.  You can find the index page here. In my previous posts on SSIS parent-child package architecture, I described the benefits of the parent-child package design pattern and demonstrated the implementation of such a pattern in package deployment mode.  In this post, I will demonstrate the parent-child pattern…


How to burn down your house while frying a turkey

It’s an odd query, yes, but in preparation to write this post I actually typed the above phrase into my browser.  No, I’m certainly not looking to burn down my house.  In fact, wait here while I clear my search history, just in case. For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re planning to fry a turkey over the upcoming…


Join me in DC for a full day of Biml

I’m excited to announce that my Linchpin People colleague Reeves Smith and I will be delivering a full day Biml preconference seminar the day before the upcoming SQL Saturday in Washington, DC.  This seminar, entitled “Getting Started with Biml”, will introduce attendees to the awesomeness of Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml). In this course, we’ll cover the basics of Biml…


SQL PASS 2014 Summit Diary – Day 6

Today is the last official day of the PASS Summit.  The sessions will wrap up at the end of the day, and we’ll all go our separate ways and resume our semi-normal lives.  Having delivered my presentation yesterday, my official PASS duties are over, and I’m planning to spend the day taking in a few sessions and networking. 08:15am: No…