Last week when I blogged about iPowerShell from Sapien, I mentioned they had a few free community tools. One of those is PowerShell Help Community Edition. As you can see, it provides a simple, easy to you way to navigate help in PowerShell. I find this especially nice as I often have my editor open in one window and want help files or other reference materials open in a second. Down the left is a tree which allows you to navigate to the type of object you are seeking help for. It also supports ...
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As a consultant I travel a lot, and am usually on my small laptop with it?s 13 inch screen. A great size for travel, but a bit small on occasion. Doing PowerShell I often want to look things up, but it?s a pain having to jump back and forth between my editor and the help. I have e-books on PowerShell which I can read on my various e-book devices, but as you might expect with a book they are not highly interactive. So the other day I ran across a solution for, of all things, my iPad. It?s called ...
OK, I admit it. I love PowerShell! It?s the way to go when you want to do automation. Not only that, it has the ability to hook into all aspects of the Microsoft tool stack. Not just SQL Server, but SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Server, and more. So here are some of my favorite resources for learning PowerShell. A quick disclaimer, some of the links below are by co-workers or other people I have an affiliation with, financial or otherwise. That?s because I?m lucky enough to work with some of the...
SharePoint is a huge topic unto itself, so I wanted to provide some links that focus on learning how to use SharePoint in the context of Business Intelligence. A quick disclaimer, some of the links below are by co-workers or other people I have an affiliation with, financial or otherwise. That?s because I?m lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the field. Also, in the case of the books I?ve linked to the Kindle version where possible, mostly because I?m a Kindle junkie. Ther...
I?ve been asked to provide links to some useful resources for learning about PowerPivot. Below are a list of my favorite blogs, books, and other sites to learn from. A quick disclaimer, some of the links below are by co-workers or other people I have an affiliation with, financial or otherwise. That?s because I?m lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the field. Also, in the case of the books I?ve linked to the Kindle version where possible, mostly because I?m a Kindle junkie. Ther...
I?ve been asked to provide links to some useful resources for learning about SQL Server Reporting Services. Below are a list of my favorite blogs, books, and other sites to learn from. A quick disclaimer, some of the links below are by co-workers or other people I have an affiliation with, financial or otherwise. That?s because I?m lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the field. Also, in the case of the books I?ve linked to the Kindle version where possible, mostly because I?m a ...
I?ve been asked to provide links to some useful resources for learning about SQL Server Analysis Services. Below are a list of my favorite blogs, books, and other sites to learn from. A quick disclaimer, some of the links below are by co-workers or other people I have an affiliation with, financial or otherwise. That?s because I?m lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the field. Also, in the case of the books I?ve linked to the Kindle version where possible, mostly because I?m a K...
I?ve been asked to provide links to some useful resources for learning about SQL Server Integration Services. Below are a list of my favorite blogs, books, and other sites to learn from. A quick disclaimer, some of the links below are by co-workers or other people I have an affiliation with, financial or otherwise. That?s because I?m lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the field. Also, in the case of the books I?ve linked to the Kindle version where possible, mostly because I?m ...
When I come to a customer site, I often have to help them get setup with TFS (Team Foundation Server) 2010, Microsoft?s source code control / ALM (application lifecycle management) system. This is so they can work with their BIDS (Business Intelligence Developer Studio) projects as a team, giving the added benefit of source code control. I?ve had to do this often enough I wanted to record the steps for my own use, and hopefully others too. Installing the TFS 2010 tools for Visual Studio / BIDS 2...
Last week Microsoft revealed there is a serious security vulnerability with the true type fond rendering code built into the Windows kernel. By simply visiting an infected website the Duqu worm can get administrative level privileges to your system, thereby installing viruses / worms on your system. Malformed MS Word documents can also be an entry vector for Duqu. While a more permanent patch is expected to be available within the next month, Microsoft has implemented a ?Fix i...
Over the last month or so, I?ve been blogging about my companies (Pragmatic Works) cool suite of SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) add in tools called Task Factory. I did this mostly to learn about the various components, and decided to video the whole thing in order to a) help myself remember and b) share the knowledge with everyone. I?m about to move onto some of our other tools, and as I explore and learn them will be adding videos as I go. I wanted to wrap up the Task Factory series wit...
Over the course of the last month I have created video tutorials on the components that ship with Pragmatic Works Task Factory suite of SSIS components. There are two though, that unfortunately I?m not able to cover, but I did want to make sure everyone was aware of. Those are the SalesForce.com Source and Destination components. These are quite similar to the SharePoint Source and Destination components I covered in previous posts. Here?s a screen shot of the Source properties window: &#...
In a previous video we looked at the SharePoint Source component, one of the many components in Pragmatic Works Task Factory suite of SSIS tools. We saw how easy it was to extract data out of a SharePoint list. What though, do we do if we need to push data into a SharePoint list? It turns out it's every bit as easy, using Task Factory's SharePoint Destination component.
Microsoft SharePoint has taken the enterprise by storm. A staggering number of corporations today are using SharePoint as their collaborative and information backbone. A tremendous amount of information is being stored within SharePoint lists. As such, it's becoming more and more important to be able to quickly and easily extract the data in those lists and bring it into other platforms for analysis, reporting and storage. SQL Server Integration Services seems like the ideal tool for moving and ...
Have you ever been in a situation where you were stuck for an answer? I mean really stuck? I sure as heck have been. Being in a spot where I really needed an experts opinion, needed to be able to get some one on one help with a problem. Unfortunately, there never seemed to be anyone else around, someone who could take the dedicated time to help with my issue. When I came to work for Pragmatic Works, I found out about this cool program we have called Virtual Mentoring. The concept is pretty simpl...
For any ETL developer, updating dimensional data is the heart of what you do. Using out of the box SSIS components, however, is an unattractive proposition. You either had to use the built in SCD wizard, or use the "roll your own" approach. As any veteran BI developer knows, the SCD wizard isn't the best in the world, primarily due to it's reliance on the OLEDB Command task. "Roll your own", in other words handling all the logic yourself, works, but is time consuming to devel...
Updating data can be a real pain. You either have to setup a special staging table in your database, then update from it, or use the slow OLEDB command. In this video we'll look at a better solution, Task Factory's Update Batch transfrom.
In past videos we looked at using the various Data cleansing transforms to clean up data coming into our SSIS package. What if you didn't want to clean that data? Instead, you may just want to validate the data, then take some action based on that validity. To accomplish that, we can use the Data Validation transform.
In past videos we've looked at the various Data Cleansing Transforms available in Task Factory. We looked at the case transform, and saw how it could handle correcting capitalization erros. We saw how the Trim Plus transform could not only be used to trim leading and trailing spaces from a column but trim specified characters or words too. Regular Expressions were also examined in the RegEx Transform video. There is one Data Cleansing component in the Task Factory suite that we haven't co...
If you are a Regular Expression guru, you've probably wished you could use Regular Expressions within your SSIS Packages. With the RegEx Replace Transform, part of the Task Factory suite of SSIS components from Pragmatic Works, you can do just that. Let's see how...
Of all the components in Task Factory, by far the coolest is the E-Mail Source. Using this nifty component you can actually pull your data into SSIS from an E-Mail! In this video you can see the Pragmatic Works tool in all it's glory. Then you can see that the E-Mail Source, like bowties, is cool.
When working with data, I often need to delete rows, but only rows for a specific set of keys I'm working with. The Task Factory Delete Batch Transform, from Pragmatic Works makes this easy. In this video, we'll make like a barbarian king and hack and slash our way through data with ease.
When extracting data, you don't always a natural key handy. Sometimes the nature of the data negates any built in key, or perhaps there's just not one present. For these situations the Surrogate Key Transform, part of the Task Factory suite from Pragmatic Works, will meet your needs. At it's core it's very simple, just add it to your data flow, provide a column name, seed value and increment value, and away you go. It's almost so simple you don't need a video, but our series would be complete wi...
In previous videos, we've looked at some of the other data cleansing operations Pragmatic Works' Task Factory offers, such as address parsing and case correction. Another common data cleansing task is trimming spaces or characters from the start and end of text columns. In this video, we'll see Task Factory's Trim Plus transform in action.
XML has become the defacto standard for information exchange across the web. The XML Destination, one of the many components found in Pragmatic Works' Task Factory suite, makes it incredibly easy to create XML files from your SQL Server Integration Services packages. In this video, you will see just how simple it is to generate easy to read XML files.