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August 2005 - Posts

• SSIS Nugget: RetainSameConnection property of the OLE DB Connection Manager

  Did you know.... ...that you can run regular SQL Server transactions in SSIS over multiple tasks without requiring the use of Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC)? Well I didn't but thanks to that man again, Kirk Haselden , I do now. The default Read More... Posted 20 August 2005 09:48 by jamie.thomson | 16 Comments Filed under: SQL Server 2005, SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server, SQL, SSIS, connection manager, RetainSameConnection, Nugget

• SSIS: How to differentiate between identically named variables with different scope

  I'm having trouble with an aspect of SSIS and I'm not getting much joy in solving it from the SSIS forum so I'm going to post it up here instead on the off-chance that someone can help. I have a task and I want to get its execution duration by finding Read More... Posted 18 August 2005 20:15 by jamie.thomson | 5 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Scripting

• SSIS: New blog for your interest

  Thomas Pagel has begun blogging on SQL Server BI features at http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/tpagel Thomas has been active on the SSIS forums for some time now so I'm sure he's got some interesting stuff to share. For example this handy little method of Read More... Posted 18 August 2005 15:24 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS

• How to find SQL Server objects

  Ashish Kaushal has written a useful little article available on http://www.sqlservercentral.com explaining how to find out if a particular object exists on a SQL Server. To that I would the following; a method of finding out all the stored procedures Read More... Posted 17 August 2005 07:34 by jamie.thomson | 8 Comments Filed under: SQL Server

• Stuff I didn't know about T-SQL!

  In the course of developing some stored procs today I learned some stuff I didn't know. 1) SELECT 'abc' AS column1 can be rewritten as SELECT column1 = 'abc' 2) SELECT SUBSTRING ( 'qwerty' , 1, LEN ( 'qwerty' ) - 1) & SELECT SUBSTRING ( 'qwert ' , Read More... Posted 11 August 2005 15:50 by jamie.thomson | 7 Comments Filed under: Inane Waffle, SQL Server

• Other Conchango bloggers

  I believe there's quite a few people reading this blog now so I thought I'd take the opportunity to publicise some of my fellow Conchango bloggers . And of course, in no way is this an attempt to get some people that have threatened to start/restart to Read More... Posted 10 August 2005 10:33 by jamie.thomson | 4 Comments Filed under: Inane Waffle

• SQL Server UK User Group Events

  The SQL UK User Group are putting on 3 BI-focused events in the near future. Analysis Services 2000 and 2005, Migration, Developing Cubes, UDM - 17th August, Reading Analysis Services 2000 and 2005, Migration, Developing Cubes, UDM - 24th August, London Read More... Posted 09 August 2005 12:01 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server

• SSIS: Script tasks and running packages from a SQL Server Agent job

  Here's a little titbit that I found out today. If you have a script task in your package that has PreCompileScriptIntoBinaryCode=FALSE and you then run the package from a SQL Server Agent job then the job step will fail with: "The script files failed Read More... Posted 08 August 2005 22:54 by jamie.thomson | 2 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Scripting

• Feedburner - another cool blog tool

  I've just come across Feedburner , that provides some dinky little tools for monitoring your blog. Just like this one which cycles through the most recent 5 postings that I've written: Or there's this for showing your current circulation (whatever that Read More... Posted 08 August 2005 20:47 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: Inane Waffle

• SSIS Nugget: Get error descriptions

  If you use an error output then you will find that you get given an error number and an error column (i.e. the column in which the error occurred) but you do not get an error description. Well not to worry because youo can get the error description using Read More... Posted 08 August 2005 19:28 by jamie.thomson | 9 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Dataflow Task, Nugget

• Duff Community Server

  Hiya, Just a short heads-up to tell you that even following Marlon's sterling work on our migration away from crappy .Text (which basically didn't work) to Community Server as our blogging engine we're still having issues, 2 of them around comments. 1) Read More... Posted 02 August 2005 22:51 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: Inane Waffle

• SSIS: Debugging your components

  Simon Sabin has written a superb post explaining in detail how to go about debugging your custom SSIS components . I'm mainly posting this as reminder to myself as I know I'll need this one day and won't be able to remember where I saw it. But its hopefully Read More... Posted 01 August 2005 21:46 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS