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November 2005 - Posts

• Working at Conchango

  I got a great feeling of pride sitting through Steve Ballmer's tubthumping speech at the launch of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2006. The two main highlighted projects were: HMV's digital download service based on Windows Media Player Read More... Posted 29 November 2005 08:53 by jamie.thomson | 2 Comments

• SSIS Nugget: A simple demo of Union and Aggregation

  While I was at the PASS Summit recently I was lucky enough to meet SQL Server guru and all round nice bloke Chris Hedgate . Chris had some polite things to say about my blog but did offer some constructive criticism - I should try and put more introductory Read More... Posted 16 November 2005 22:33 by jamie.thomson | 12 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Dataflow Task, Nugget

• New SSIS blogger on the block

  Scott Barrett has begun a blog dedicated to implementing Microsoft BI technologies, mainly SSIS. Now I know there's alot of people out there with similar themed blogs but what makes Scott's valuable is he is actively building a proper data warehouse using Read More... Posted 16 November 2005 19:36 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS

• SSIS: What's the difference between DT_DATE and DT_DBTIMESTAMP

  Database people don't generally like date values too much. They're too fiddly. There's god-knows-how-many ways of representing them...and don't even get me started on regional date settings!! Naturally SSIS contains a datatype that can hold dates. In Read More... Posted 15 November 2005 19:51 by jamie.thomson | 17 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS

• SSIS: Loading to Oracle

  Many customers are unhappy that SSIS performance is slow slow slow when inserting to Oracle. Donald Farmer sets outs a few of the reasons for this here: http://www.sqljunkies.com/WebLog/donald_farmer/archive/2005/03/13/8819.aspx A guy called Scott Barrett Read More... Posted 15 November 2005 06:59 by jamie.thomson | 2 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Oracle

• SSIS: Location for your package templates

  Phillipe Cand asked me recently where you should put your SSIS templates so that you can use them as the basis for your packages. The answer is: %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7 \IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\DataTransformationProject\DataTransformationItems Read More... Posted 12 November 2005 14:17 by jamie.thomson | 9 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, template

• SSIS: Throwing errors from script task/component

  I'm working on a project at the moment that entails making calls to external DLLs from within a script task or script component. In our case the DLL in question is a web service proxy and we've been having numerous problems getting it to work. Being able Read More... Posted 03 November 2005 15:35 by jamie.thomson | 3 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Scripting

• SSIS: Indirect configurations ROCK!

  By now alot of you will be familiar with Configurations right? I am using XML configuration files extensively in my current project - they're a method of affecting the way your package executes - the most common use is to store connection strings for Read More... Posted 02 November 2005 11:24 by jamie.thomson | 69 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, configurations, indirect configurations

• SSIS: VSA requires DLLs to be in the Microsoft.Net folder (but not all the time)

  Recently I have been using the SSIS Script Task and Script Component quite heavily. For those that don't know, these items use Visual Studio for Applications (VSA) under the covers. There is a peculiar limitation of VSA that requires you to place Read More... Posted 02 November 2005 10:25 by jamie.thomson | 6 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS

• Windows Firewall blocks MS DTC

  I've been wrestling with a Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) issue today and thought it was worth noting the workaround on here. The error occurred whilst running an SSIS package but this post isn't really related to SSIS - its a Read More... Posted 02 November 2005 09:11 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: Inane Waffle