Protean

I love the idea of Web 2.0 - I jumped on the social networking bandwagon at a fairly early stage getting involved with AOL’s attempt to compete with myspace with its AIM pages. Its great that people with shared interests can join a network and interact with each other in a way that couldn’t be done before.

And I currently maintain profiles at LinkedIn, flickr, facebook & twitter, youtube, picasa, pprune.org and SSC. These profiles I can handle quite nicely along with my own hobby sites and various shopping websites that I use. I have always argued that privacy concerns can be managed Read the rest of this entry »

Citi Group Building

I’ve been working at Canary Wharf for 6 months now. Its a fantastic looking place, and it lends itself well to photography. I thought I’d post a couple of shots while I think up some useful database article to write about. I feel its been so long since I’ve written, that I forgotten how!


Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading a post by BI Monkey and found myself in agreement with what he says. It also got me thinking about the wider implications of the problem of not “helping you make better decisions”.

I’d add to BI Monkey’s question with the specific question I always ask business analysts as they begin to list out the attributes they want added to a dimension in a requirements meeting. “What question does this answer?”. It’s a BI specialist’s responsibility not just to resolve the technical aspects of the requirements, but also to help steer the requirements so that something useful is delivered at the end.

I think this is one of the reasons why support from the business can fade. And without champion users in the wider business, it’s very likely that a BI implementation will be paralysed. People don’t understand the information provided and so don’t use it. Why keep funding the project if nobody uses it? Or the last (over-scoped) project took so long that the team isn’t trusted to take on new projects. Here are some scenarios…

Read the rest of this entry »

I know as SQL Server / IT pros we tend to focus our interview efforts on our technical proficiency. Having been on many interview panels, I can say this - by the time you’ve sat through a phone screen, a SQL Server test, and finally you’ve been brought in for interview, we already know that you have the technical skills to do the job and what we’re looking for is the right fit for the team.

I may ask you some harder questions on my chosen subject, I may challenge you about some of the answers you have given for the technical test, I may interrogate you about why you left a perfectly good job. The aim here is not to prove that I’m right and you’re wrong, it’s to see how you handle the situation. Can you argue your case persuasively and confidently, can you think on the spot, how do you react when your views are challenged?

I use the dialog that we have to get some idea of how you might be to work with and what your attitudes are. Exactly what the right attitudes are can be hard to tell, but I can tell you what they aren’t! Here are some of the reason’s why I might have questions about a person’s suitability for my team. What often surprises me is that candidates fail on some of these before they’ve even met me…

Read the rest of this entry »

The script task in SSIS was a fantastic improvement on DTS Active X script. The reasons for this in my view are 2 fold:-

1. Firstly, by allowing the user to code in Visual Studio it is far easier to develop and debug. Because the developer can make use of intellisense & object explorer, it means even the casual programmer can read & write code.
2. Secondly, because we can use it to access other external .net assemblies, it provides functionality for logic that can’t be achieved using the standard SSIS components.

These are both reasons in themselves that make it a compelling choice when deciding how to develop your package logic.

However, I have noticed at both client sites and on the forums, that there are those (the script task junkies!) that use the script task in almost any scenario when it is just not necessary. It makes maintenance and support tricky at best and sometimes impossible…

Read the rest of this entry »

In writing this post I was thinking about those tools that aren’t necessarily for database programming but at the same time I wouldn’t want to be without. It then got me to thinking about what software surpassed my expectations in what ways.

Whilst I’m a fan of open source technology, frequently it has left me cold. Or there have been times when I’ve installed some software that I really wish I hadn’t and wandered how I could have been so lax as to risk my data and operating system on an untested application. But then there are occasions also when I’m pleasantly surprised. An open source application that does something better / faster / easier than its proprietary counter parts, or an application that I’ve purchased that does everything it says on the tin without paying through the roof.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know about you, but one of the things that drives me to distraction when writing SSIS packages is being forced to use excel as a data source. I’d like to qualify that statement by adding that it’s the use of excel in the face of all reason, to do the job that other software would be better for. Unfortunately though, corporations and people being what they are, they are a fact of life for an ETL developer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the scenario… You have a RAW file which contains data from many files.

In the subsequent dataflow you need to perform a lookup against a large reference table, however you want just a subset that reflects the period contained within your RAW file.

Question 1, how do you find out the earliest date used within your RAW file data? And question 2, how do you write it to a variable so that you can use it in the subsequent data flow?

Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you will have heard the mantra that loops are bad, set based is good. But how do you get around them?

The fact of the matter is that there are very few circumstances where a loop is the only way to achieve your objective. A look through the SQL forums will show you many a technique to turn iterative row by row processing into single transaction set based processing. I’m refering to hierarchical query techniques (see nested set theory) and of course the subject of this post, the numbers table.

Read the rest of this entry »

In an earlier post, I demonstrated how to send HTML formatted mail using the script task. Another frequently requested use of the mail task is to be able to send query results within the email message body. Here’s how…

Read the rest of this entry »