Without a doubt, the most versatile data flow tool in the SSIS arsenal is the script component. This control grants ETL developers complete control over the flow of data, leverages the full power of the .NET Framework namespaces, and can be used as a source, destination, or transformation in data flow operations. Within the script logic, one can perform complex…
Earlier this week, I confirmed two full-day seminars I’ll be delivering in conjunction with SQL Saturday events this fall. I’ve got a brand new course entitled “Building Better SSIS Packages” which I’ll be delivering in Denver and Boston. Here’s a brief into to this course: SQL Server Integration Services is deceptively easy to use. With a few hours of instruction…
The key to successful analysis is to ask enough good questions. How do you know that you’ve asked enough questions? When you think you have all the information you need to get started, ask 10 more good questions. Those ten questions will lead to five more, which will lead to 3 more, and so on. After you get started, if…
I’m a fixer. A tinkerer. As a kid, I would take my toys apart just to see how they worked, and to prove that I could put them back together again (and these experiments often had mixed results). Even today, I’m still kind of a shade tree handyman. In fact, earlier this week I had to fix a broken safety…
During data load or transformation processes, capturing a distinct row number for incoming data can be beneficial for the ETL process itself, as well as for use in the destination database. Having an arbitrary, incrementing row number assigned to each row can help to determine the order in which the rows of data were processed, and can provide a unique…
Now that the details have been finalized, I can announce that a new SSIS class coming up this fall. My Linchpin People cohort Andy Leonard and I will be delivering our Advanced SSIS training class in the Washington, DC area in December. This class is four days in length, ideally suited for experienced SSIS developers who want to take their skills…
Through the course of my 8-someodd years of building and fixing ETL processes, I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of ETL code. Some of that code was really good, well-thought-out and carefully executed. Other load processes were – well, let’s just say that they provide plenty of consulting opportunities (and I include much of my early code in…
Dear vendor: If you’re reading this, we have done business together, either directly or indirectly. You might be a retail website from which I purchase products or services. You could be a social media empire on which I share blog posts, life events, and photos of my meals. You may be a physician’s office I visited 15 years ago. You…
In my most recent post in this series, I talked about how to use the SSIS object variable as an ADO recordset as a source in a data flow. By loading the result set of a query into this variable, the contents of the variable can be read by an SSIS script component and sent out through the SSIS pipeline….
Everybody wants to be liked, to some extent. Being disliked by others feels like a deficiency, a shortcoming in oneself that must be fixed. It feels like a failure that you’ve let someone down, or even worse, it can make you feel like you’re somehow broken or deficient. I would argue the opposite: It’s only a dysfunction if nobody dislikes…