This past Saturday, I made the relatively short (3 hour) drive north to Oklahoma City to participate in their first ever SQL Saturday event. I have to say that this was one of the best SQL Saturday events I’ve attended, which is especially notable since it was their first such event. The venue they chose was the Moore Norman Technology…
As I write this, I’m somewhere in the air over Florida, headed back home to Dallas from participating in the first-ever SQL Rally event. The past few days have been an adventure in many ways, and I’m happy to report that the entire experience was both positive and memorable. Wednesday The trip started out in chaos: an immense line of…
Next week, I’ll be making a swing through central Colorado on a working vacation of sorts. I met up with Marc Beacom when I went up to Denver to speak at their SQL Saturday in September, and he mentioned that they have three user groups (Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Denver) that meet on three consecutive nights each month. My love…
The second day of the SQL PASS summit has already started in unique fashion. Today is #sqlkilt day, and there are a dozen or more guys and gals dressed in fine Scottish attire. Bill Graziano, executive VP of finance for PASS, was playfully booed when he took the stage for having worn pants on kilt day. Bill took the time…
So the question came up earlier today about the RIGHT() and LEFT() functions in the SSIS expression language. Like the Transact-SQL functions, one might assume that these functions would exist in SSIS expression language to snatch a specified subset of a string. That assumption would be only half right. Don’t go digging for a LEFT() function in the expression language,…
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…
The SSIS expression language is a powerful yet enigmatic entity. Once you get used to its syntax – which is part C#, part T-SQL and part *WTH?!?* – it’s actually somewhat fun to use. However, one thing it appears to be lacking is the ability to use an if/then/else statement. However, there actually is such an instrument, though it doesn’t…