Devin Knight

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• Using Excel 2007 in SSIS 2005
  Many companies are not in a rush to upgrade their SQL Servers because of the enormous cost to upgrade.  This results in the majority of companies still running previous versions of SQL Server (2005, 2000, and even earlier).  Many times as the developer you are forced to work with older server components but new file sources like Excel 2007 with SQL Server and SSIS 2005.  In this case, there are some workarounds that will allow using what seem like two incompatible platforms.  This is a highly bl...
  SSIS
  3/2/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 1
• Using Database Transactions across multiple SSIS Tasks
  If you experiment at all with transactions that are built into SSIS you will discover that they are highly flawed.  For example, if you have a transaction running on an entire package some tasks may not rollback on a failure.  A file system task is one of the major culprits that on a failure will not rollback the file operation it is performing.  I wish I was writing to give you a solution to that problem today but I’m actually writing to show how you could use a typical database transaction acr...
  SSIS
  3/2/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 1
• IntelliSense Slow to Refresh
  IntelliSense in SQL Server 2008 can sometimes not be very intelligent.  It’s there to help you can sometimes cause more problems than it does solve problems.  Here’s one of those problems cases: Create a table without using the UI.  Just type a basic script to create a table.   Try to select from that newly created table and your IntelliSense can’t find the new table.   The problem is SQL Server knows you have a new table but IntelliSense does not.  If you refresh the Local Cache IntelliSense wi...
  SQL Server 2008
  2/23/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 0
• Free Webinar Series This Week
  If you haven’t heard already this week there is a great free webinar series going on that’s meant for beginners.  This series is meant to get you up to speed on many topics like TSQL, DBA Fundamentals, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, and Performance Tuning.  Oh and did don’t forget it’s free!  It’s your opportunity to see speakers and authors like Jorge Segarra, Patrick LeBlanc, Brian Knight, Brad McGehee, Adam Jorgensen, and myself!  All sessions are recorded so even if you miss the original filming you can ...
  SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, DBA
  2/22/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 0
• Development Lifecycle Deployment SSAS, SSRS, SSIS
  Many companies have a very rigid development lifecycle for all products or solutions they develop.  Deploying to each of these environments (Development, UAT, and Production) can be a nightmare to maintain.  Luckily there is a great feature in Visual Studio called Solution Configurations, which will allows you to toggle between which environment you want to deploy changes to. This feature should be already available by default in your Visual Studio but you may have never used it.    As you can s...
  SSAS, SSIS, SSRS
  2/17/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 0
• Foundation Class Review
  This week was an exciting teaching week for me.  I taught the Pragmatic Works Foundation class, one of my favorite and most rewarding classes to teach.    This class is designed to help individuals who have a passion for technology but do not have means to pay for training.  We spend a week teaching basic TSQL and also some Reporting Services to give them a skill to make it easier to market each person for potential jobs.   In this week’s class we had a wide variety of people with all completely...
  Foundation
  2/12/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 0
• Pragmatic Works Foundation Class Introduction
  You may have noticed a flux of new blog post entires yesterday from a group of people talking about the Pragmatic Works Foundation.  This is a great group of people that are new to IT and learning the basics of SQL Server. Per our website: The Pragmatic Works Foundation was created to find passionate people who are interested in joining the technology field but cannot make the financial investments needed for training and hardware. Working with our job placement partners our goal is to place all...
  Foundation
  2/9/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 0
• SSRS Commonly Required Date Expressions
  Reporting Services has many expressions that can manipulate date fields.  These expressions can be used just about anywhere in SSRS including object properties, displayed data, and parameters.  Recently I’ve worked on some projects that required date parameters to do things that you would typically see in an Analysis Services cube.  My client needed to see data brought back Week to Date, Month to date,   Year to date, and on with a rolling week.  My first suggestion of course was to create a cub...
  SSRS
  2/5/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 0
• Handling Escape Sequences in SSIS Expression String Literals
  The SSIS expression language is a powerful tool for a developer that gives you one method of making a package dynamic.  When writing an expression there are a few things to be careful of that could potentially cause a stumbling block while writing code.  For example, a common reason you may write expressions is to populate a changing file name.  Say you want to have a file loaded but the name of the file should change each day the SSIS package is ran to have the current date appended to the end ...
  SSIS
  1/27/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 3
• SSIS Checkpoints with Tasks Running in Parallel
  Several months ago I blogged about why Checkpoints are a great feature in SSIS to use.  It seems with every feature there are potential problems you can run into and it is no different with Checkpoints.  The major problem or what some people would call a feature is when Control Flow tasks are run in parallel checkpoints act a little erratically.   The obvious solution for this is to not run tasks in parallel and instead have all your tasks kick off sequentially.  Here’s an example of the problem...
  SSIS
  1/22/2010  by DevinKnight  Comments: 2