I’ve noticed a lot of people, myself included, use a message box to display the values of script variables for debugging purposes. However, there are several drawbacks to using a message box. It stops the execution of the script and must be dismissed so the script can continue. Sometimes the message box will even be hidden by other windows making you think the script is still running. As an alternative, you can write the value of your variable to the Execution Results tab and the Output wi...
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I have been exploring the various tasks available in SSIS and thought I would put together a tutorial on the Web Service Task. Using this task is pretty straightforward, but some of the settings are not too clear. Here is a step-by-step guide. 1. Create a package-level variable named StockSymbol with a data type of String and a value of MSFT. 2. Add a new connection manager by right-clicking the Connection Managers window and selecting New Connection. 3. When prompted for the type, select HTTP a...
Being a long-time SQL Server user, I have written a lot of stored procedures and made full use of input and output parameters as well as return values. When I started learning and working with SSIS, one of the first things I wanted to know was how to call and get results from stored procedures. Mike Davis has a blog posting on calling stored procedures and passing input parameters so I thought I would address return values and output parameters. Here’s a simple stored procedure that has one inpu...
I was browsing the Microsoft Learning portal over the weekend and came across the following free or dicounted learning resources for SQL Server. Free Resources: Clinic 6188: What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for Enterprise Data Platform (1 hour) Clinic 6189: What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for Business Intelligence (1 hour) Clinic 6190: What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for Database Development (1 hour) Clinic 6258: New Features Of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services...
Although this is not directly related to BI, I thought I would share some T-SQL tricks that I've picked up over the years. The reason I chose the title is because at first glance these SQL statements might not look like they would work or the reason they do work is not very intuitive. Returning Values from Multiple Rows in a Single Row Normally, if you want to combine values from multiple rows you would use a cursor or a loop. With this trick, it can be done with a single SQL statement. For exam...