Slides and demos for my hdc08omaha talks are now available for download from http://tinyurl.com/5oykgj Thanks to all who attended!

Lookup. For many SQL Server Integration Services Developers, it's the transformation we most love to dislike - especially if you are using it against data living on remote server not on the same local network as the host running your package. This combination of circumstances sometimes drives us to some very inventive things. In this post I want ...

You have to give credit where credit is due, and I certainly have to give credit to Kirk Haselden et al and their book Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. That book -- and some of trial and error -- taught me a lot about how to tune data flow tasks for better performance. The folks at Simple Talk have part of the book online ...

I am going to get myself in trouble (again) by saying this but SSIS isn’t a Business Intelligence tool as much as it is a developer tool. If you are like me, you have written a lot of code does, basically, the following: Extracts the data from some place; Transforms that data somehow; Loads the transformed data into database or some other ...

In class this week, I got asked a few times about the technical books I'd recommed for fulks interested in the data space. While I've had a list up on Amazon for while, I thought I'd post an updated list here. I'd love to hear your suggestions, too! Business Intelligence Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel: Gordon S. Linoff Data Mining & ...

On 6 August 2008, I will be giving a presentation to the Omaha SQL/BI User Group on the new features in SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. We will talk about improvements in scripting, how the redesigned pipeline improves performance and how to leverage the new Cache Transform to improve package performance. Quinn Jones from Farm Credit ...

I've had a lot of ''fun'' working the with new spatial types in SQL Server 2008. Fun like your first root canal sometimes, fun like a great first date other times. One of the ''root canal moments'' for me has been around Geographic Markup Language (GML) support. I had spent a good chunk of time generating GML for use in class to subsequently ...

Yesterday I drove down from Sioux Falls to Omaha so that I could catch a talk being given by Sudhir Gajre to the Omaha SQL Server/BI Interest Group. I first got to know Sudhir when he, I and Luke Schollmeyer were restarting a SQL Server Users Group in Omaha. Sudhir is a stud at SQL Server performance tuning and helped write one of the best papers ...

Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen master who came America in 1959, once wrote that ''in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.'' This definitely seems to be to of SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS). But not always in a good way. If you are coming to Integration Services from SQL Server 2000's Data ...

One of the first tasks we must do well as SSIS developers is really understand our source data. That seems rather obvious but it when we fail to do this task well, we frequently end up having to re-plan, re-work and re-do the packages we have designed. Generally speaking there are five facets to data that we need to have correct understanding of ...