Over the weekend, I went to the local theater to watch Sully, the movie about the US Airways pilot who successfully landed his A320 jet on an icy river after losing both engines shortly after takeoff. I enjoyed the movie for its main story line but also for some of the back story elements that were included that were scarcely…
I am excited to share that I will be presenting at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas in October of this year. This is my fourth (if I remember correctly) time to have spoken at DevConnections, and the first time I will have delivered a full-day workshop there. This year I will present one workshop and two regular presentations: Building…
Question from someone in one my recent classes: “What tool do you use to send email from ETL processes?” My response: “I don’t.” The tl;dr version of this post is I let my extract-transform-load processes do just ETL, and leave notifications to the scheduling system where they belong. Get Your Email Out of my ETL Before you read any further,…
Imagine for a moment that you’ve built a software thing. In fact, we’ll call it The Thing. You put a lot of work into The Thing, and it does exactly what you wanted it to. You put The Thing into play as part of a larger solution and, after a couple of revisions, its behavior is verified and it is…
Recently I’ve been talking a lot with clients and others about the involvement of cloud architecture in a data warehouse design. In fact, this topic was the focus of my most recent Data Geek newsletter publication. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my friend Carlos Chacon for the SQL Data Partners podcast, during which…
I’ve had a lot of luck in my career, especially as it pertains to my work environment. Although I can’t say every technical job I’ve had was all unicorns and bacon, I’ve been very fortunate to have been treated fairly and professionally through most of my employment history. Not only was I treated respectfully, but the last three employers I…
It seems like it was just yesterday that we all said goodbye in Seattle at last year’s PASS Summit, but the calendar on the wall says that the next event is a mere four months away. This means that it’s that time of year again: the schedule of sessions has been published. I am happy to announce that I’ll be presenting…
Bad data can kill. Literally. I’m not talking about the impact of bad data on the bottom line of business, where estimates of total losses are usually gauged in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Nor am I talking about the inconvenience we all face when presented with a real-world situation resulting from incorrect or stale data. The…
Before I began my technical career over a decade and a half ago, I spent several years working in law enforcement. In that field, one of the things one must learn quickly is the concept of the chain of custody of evidence. There were numerous procedures we had to follow to ensure that evidence was not just gathered and preserved,…
If you are looking for affordable, high-quality training on SQL Server Integration Services, you may be interested in one of the two full-day workshops I have scheduled for August of this year. I’ll be taking my popular course Building Better SSIS Packages on the road to Baton Rouge, Louisiana and San Antonio, Texas. This course is designed for the data…