After my first day of SSIS training my boss walked into the office and said to me, "how was the first day of class". To which I responded, "great!" Then asked me, "so what is the difference between the control flow and data flow?" This posed a simple, but foundational concept, of SSIS. There are a few key things to remember when talking about the differences between control flow and data flow, and not just the completely obvious statement: data flow deals with data. Hopefully if you are beginnin...
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If your like me, then you may have a little OCD and need everything to be completely organized in your environment. BIDS has been annoying me in this respect lately. I am working on creating a data warehouse and will be starting on the next portion of the project shortly. I wanted to keep everything for it in the same solution, my warehouse ETL as well as the work on the Cube. So I figure, create the solution and add a new project for the Cube. So I create a new project and much to my dismay the...
I recently created a maintenance plan for our server to backup all the databases on a daily basis. In the cleanup step I set it to delete backups older than 7 day. I let the plan run for a week and checked on it to make sure the old backups were being deleted. This would be kind of a useless post if everything was working correctly, so as you guessed, they were not being deleted. I check everything on the plan: Username, folder name, first level subfolders, permissions on the backup folder, sql ...
You may need to do an update on joined tables to get a more conditional update. For instance, I have a Student table as well as an AcademicStatus table. The Student table contains all the students (profound, I know) and the AcademicStatus table tells if a student is in good standing, at risk, or has dropped out based on a StandingID. The Student table also lists a graduation date and a current bit to show if the student is currently enrolled. While generating data for these particular tables rec...
During the recnet launch of the new community site www.BIDN.com I found a few features in Google Chrome while I was testing that I wanted to bring to Firefox. Specifically the search bar functionality. In Google Chrome the address bar doubles as the search bar. This is and is not the case with Firefox. In Firefox if you type a search into the address bar it will do a Google Search and bring you to the first search result. In effect it is like doing a Google search and clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky...
I was recently working with some virtual machines during testing and needed to copy one of the VPCs to a developer. He brought me his hard drive and I proceeded to copy the Virtual Hard Drive onto his external USB drive. The operation failed and I was not sure why. It was a big mistake to assume the drive was formatted in NTFS format, which I figured "why wouldn't it be", as it was actually in FAT32 which has a file size limitation of 4GB. So he changed the drive to NTFS and everything worked pe...