In the first installment of this discussion, I talked about the challenges facing database professionals and others with respect to healthcare data integration. In this post I’ll talk about the first part of the problem: a lack of adoption of the required technologies and/or methodologies. I’ll also describe when an electronic health record really isn’t. We’ve all seen it; it…
Anyone who has kept up with PASS-related news during the past couple of weeks is keenly aware of the fallout surrounding this year’s Board of Directors election. I’ve been associated with PASS for a number of years now (though admittedly I wasn’t as connected or involved as I am now), but I can’t recall there ever having been a BOD election…
Last week, I had lunch with an old friend who is, by his own definition, technologically ignorant. While we caught up, he asked me to explain in terms he could understand what I do for a living. I went through one of my spiels (the one usually reserved for relatives who only know that I work “with computers”), delivering a…
If you are a blogger and you post product reviews on your blog, you may have to answer to the FTC starting in December. An article in the New York Times earlier this week outlines a new Federal Trade Commission regulation currently under review which, if approved, would tighten the rules of disclosure that must be followed by those who…
So you’ve got some packages that regularly extract data to one or more text files, but you know that from time to time some of the queries will not return any data. However, you find in SSIS that, in a flat file export package, the output file is created regardless of whether any rows are written to the file, and…
It has been well-documented through myriad blogs and forum posts about the case sensitivity of the comparisons in the SSIS lookup transformation (a good review can be found here). In a nutshell, a comparison using the lookup transformation is case sensitive when using the default setting of Full Cache, even if the values in the database are stored in a case…
Recently, my friend Jack Corbett asked a question on Twitter: In a nutshell, the SSIS foreach loop will enumerate a given list of items (files in a directory, nodes in an XML file, static list of values, etc.) and will perform some operation for each of the items in the collection. This behavior is similar to foreach loop constructs that…
In a couple of previous posts (Part One and Part Two), I shared some thoughts about starting a career path as a database professional, including some notes from my own journey. In this final segment, I’ll share a few discrete tips that will hopefully be useful to those interested in this field. Build Your Foundation: You’re going to need some…
Working with an ETL design that does a straight insert operation is the most simple, but often ETL processes are required to update data as well. There are several ways to go about updating data with SSIS, one of which (the staging table method) requires a bit more setup but can also perform significantly better. Updating Data with SSIS I…
I ran into a situation this week that brought to light a subtle syntactical error I’d made in creating an SSIS package. I’ve got a client that has given me access to their development server to create some complex extraction queries, which will eventually be rolled into SSIS packages. Since I’m working with read-only access and cannot create stored procedures…