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July 2007 - Posts

• SSIS: A response from Microsoft to some growing criticism

  Last week was an interesting week in the SSIS community instigated fairly and squarely by Oren Eini's blog entry entitled SSIS' 15 faults . The discussion really reached critical mass when Steve Jones highlighted it in his weekly newsletter Database Read More... Posted 30 July 2007 19:01 by jamie.thomson | 11 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS

• Will blogging tools become more than blogging tools?

  I am currently writing this blog entry on a flight somewhere over the USA using Windows Live Writer as my offline blogging tool. Anyone that has used it will tell you what a great tool it is for doing this. Currently Live Writer allows rich offline editing Read More... Posted 29 July 2007 17:07 by jamie.thomson | 1 Comments Filed under: Inane Waffle, Windows Live, Writer

• Virtual Earth, calling Side Street. Come in SideStreet. Over...

  Perhaps it really is over!! There was an interesting internal email thread within Conchango today which began with an email from Simon Knightley saying this: I recently came across Microsoft’s response to Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth at Read More... Posted 27 July 2007 13:36 by jamie.thomson | 2 Comments Filed under: Windows Live, virtual earth, live maps, google, Sidestreet, streetview, HDView, Photosynth, Seadragon

• SSIS: The backlash

  UPDATE: I have posted a response from Denise Draper, head of the SSIS team, here: http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2007/07/30/SSIS_3A00_-A-response-from-Microsoft-to-the-growing-criticism.aspx A colleague recently pointed out this thread Read More... Posted 27 July 2007 06:23 by jamie.thomson | 48 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS

• Mobile search clients reviewed

  One month ago I published a review of Google Maps for Mobile and Windows Live Search for Mobile which you can read here . Today Gear Digest have published their own, much more detailed, comparison of the two as well as Yahoo's similar offering. Unlike Read More... Posted 27 July 2007 00:12 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: Windows Live, Microsoft, live maps, google maps, google, yahoo pipes, gmm, wls

• SSIS Nugget: Bitwise Checkpointing

  Checkpoint usage in SSIS is a topic that is not well understood at all. The mechanism for defining checkpoint files and configuring containers to use them is "fiddly" at best and isn't helped by a bug in the Sequence Container (of which you can read more Read More... Posted 19 July 2007 00:11 by jamie.thomson | 5 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Checkpoints, Nugget

• Business Intelligence, what is it and what is it not?

  Introduction What is Business Intelligence? The term "Business intelligence" was coined by Howard Dresner in the late 80s to describe an emerging discipline concerned with the discovery of information in an enterprise. Over the years the term Read More... Posted 18 July 2007 06:18 by jamie.thomson | 24 Comments Filed under: Business Intelligence, Information Architecture

• Windows Live: v2 of Windows Live Search for Mobile hits the shelves

  Version 2 of Windows Live Search for Mobile (WLS) has been released. Read the announcement here which contains screenshots and in this case a picture really does tell a thousand words. Here's the list of new features: Get movie times Search for restaurants Read More... Posted 12 July 2007 20:40 by jamie.thomson | 0 Comments Filed under: Windows Live, Microsoft, live maps, google maps, wls

• The power of schema abstraction

  Gert Drapers has posted a really good article today which you can read here . In it he suggests a best practice of always putting a view layer in between your database tables and the consumers of your data. He explains some scenarios where this technique Read More... Posted 12 July 2007 18:02 by jamie.thomson | 2 Comments Filed under: Data Architecture, best practice

• Who said the SSIS team don't listen to feedback?

  Over the past few years I've been fairly vocal (though usually not on this site) in criticising the SSIS team for their overall lack of feedback to SSIS items submitted through Connect - that's not an easy thing to do either given that I've Read More... Posted 07 July 2007 00:13 by jamie.thomson | 2 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS

• Will Windows one day be free?

  That's a question I started asking myself yesterday as I read this post from Yaron Goland. Here's a sprinkling from that entry: Sigh…. I know… I know… Microsoft… evil… proprietary… no cross platform… Read More... Posted 05 July 2007 22:16 by jamie.thomson | 2 Comments Filed under: Windows Live, Microsoft, windows

• Zune thought...

  Zune is way behind iPod in the mp3-player game so they need a USP to help them compete - track sharing over wifi hasn't helped them yet. So, here's an idea for them (and for the iPod crew come to that) - how about doing the same for books that Read More... Posted 05 July 2007 05:14 by jamie.thomson | 6 Comments Filed under: Zune

• Astoria, SSIS, Popfly, et al...

  Just 3 days after my Astoria blog entry and some more well-timed Astoria-related news has hit the shelves. Jon Udell has done a podcast interview with the main man behind Astoria, Pablo Castro (I linked to Pablo's blog in my aforementioned blog entry). Read More... Posted 04 July 2007 21:41 by jamie.thomson | 1 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Popfly, Astoria, REST, ADO.Net Data Services, RESTful

• SSIS Nugget: Output the number of processed rows

  Here's a handy little tip for when you are building custom destination components or script destination components that enables you to log the number of processed rows. Have you ever seen that handy little message that appears in your logs that tells Read More... Posted 03 July 2007 20:30 by jamie.thomson | 3 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, Dataflow Task, Scripting, Nugget Attachment(s): JT OutputtingRowsProcessed.zip

• SSIS: Keep a scratch project

  Here's a little tip for you that I've found incredibly useful over the past few months - something that I suspect a lot of you do already. When I'm involved in a project on which I am implementing SSIS packages I like to keep all packages Read More... Posted 03 July 2007 05:11 by jamie.thomson | 1 Comments Filed under: SQL Server Integration Services, Inane Waffle, SSIS

• Live Folders cometh!

  For those of you that don't read the same RSS feeds as me, Live Folders is now available as a limited beta to the first 5000 people to apply. This means that 5000 people can upload files but anyone in the world can download the public-facing ones. Read More... Posted 01 July 2007 17:35 by jamie.thomson | 1 Comments Filed under: Windows Live, Live Folders, SkyDrive