This past weekend I made the relatively short (about 3 hours) trip to the Oklahoma City area to attend and speak at the third annual SQL Saturday event there. I’ve been invited to speak at each of their three events, and I’ve been impressed with each one of them so far. The folks in the OKC and surrounding groups have…
Of the many emerging technologies I’m currently using, there’s nothing that excites me more than Biml. If you’re not familiar with it, Biml (short for Business Intelligence Markup Language) is a language that allows business intelligence developers to programmatically create and document SSIS packages. I’ve found this to be incredibly useful in environments that have a large number of packages,…
When it comes to ETL, I’m a pessimist. Until proven otherwise, I assume that all data is bad, all connections are volatile, and all transformation logic is suspect. As such, I spent a lot of time addressing how to prepare for and handle errors in the ETL pipeline with SSIS. Building packages to expect and properly handle errors is a…
Through the course of my career, I’ve spent time on both sides of the job interview table, which has given me an empathy for both job interviewees as well as their interviewers. The former wants to put his best foot forward to demonstrate (or at least talk about) his most appealing attributes, while the latter seeks to find the best…