In a nutshell, Biml is automation for SSIS package creation. Biml is an acronym for Business Intelligence Markup Language, which is an XML-based language and interpreter to allow programmatic construction of SSIS packages. If you are building a lot of similar SSIS packages, or the metadata for the packages changes frequently, Biml can significantly reduce the amount of time and…
When designing the ETL architecture for new or changing systems, one of the more common needs is to create a process that copies all of the data from a set of tables (perhaps even all tables) from a source system to a destination database. This is especially prevalent when building an operation data store (ODS), or building a set of…
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…
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…
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,…
Creating useful reports is part art and part science. On one end of the spectrum, you have visually appealing and highly customized reports and dashboards that are truly works of art. These often illicit “oohs” and “aahs” at first glance, and can help to creatively tell the story of the underlying data. On the other end of the spectrum is…
I am honored to have been selected to be a presenter at this year’s PASS Summit coming up this November. I will be presenting a half-day talk entitled Build a Metadata-Driven ETL Repository with Biml and SSIS: Your boss tells you that a new field will be added to one of your vendor’s data files, and asks how long it will…
Decades ago when I was working as a retail clerk, I had a boss named Billy. Billy was a pragmatic guy who had worked in retail most of his adult life, and was full of practical tidbits of advice. He also had no tolerance for inefficiency, and was quick to point out when there was a more effective way to…
Having the right tools for the job makes the work much more efficient. However, for those just starting out in SQL Server land, it may not be clear which tools are useful or appropriate for a given task. I regularly field questions about which tools I use on my development machines, and why. To that end, I’ve compiled a brief…
It has been a fantastic week here in Seattle at the annual PASS Summit. I’ve spent the last five days hanging out with 4,000 or so of my closest friends while teaching and learning more about SQL Server and data management. Although my schedule kept me busy – I delivered 3 sessions including a half-day on Biml – but I…