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News just in… Microsoft have purchased Zoomix, a data quality software vendor. From the press release: Zoomix will contribute a critical layer of data improvement to Microsoft's SQL Server Data Platform Interesting stuff. One would think this will sit fairly and squarely within SSIS given that SSIS will be shipping Data Profiling ...

Quick note. Doug Laudenschlager (I've checked and rechecked the spelling - I think that's right :) from the SSIS team has begun a SSIS related blog at Dougbert.com (RSS feed). Doug is the technical writer on the team which means that he writes all the SSIS documentation in SQL Server Books Online. Hence, what Doug doesn't know about SSIS really ...

SQL Server 2008 is introducing some interesting querying and storage enhancements such as the introduction of spatial data and the FILESTREAM attribute on VARBINARY(MAX) columns and my thoughts have recently turned to what querying enhancements we are going to see in future versions. I was chatting to Rob Farley recently and we started to wonder ...

In the past I have advocated (and still do advocate) the use of a user variable in SSIS packages to store the path to a folder on the hard drive; I always use a variable called @[User::RootFolder] for this. Having this path available within a package variable enables you to dynamically set the location of files that your package may reference ...

A question I quite often see on the SSIS forum is: Is there a way to delete a group of files within a directory? ie: I want to delete all files in directorty c:\logs\*.txt (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3196521&SiteID=1) Well its actually quite easy, you just need  ForEach Loop container and the FileSystem Task. ...

Next Monday (14th April) brings with it the start of the Microsoft MVP Summit 2008. This is an opportunity for all of the (give or take a few) 4000 MVPs from around the world to travel to Seattle and engage with Microsoft product teams with a view to helping them improve their products. Someone somewhere has deigned that I have the honour of being ...

In the past few days I have twice received some good news about small enhancements that are making it into katmai.  Here's the first one: Output config info to the output window Request: I have recently inherited some packages from someone else. In trying to figure out what they actually do I was getting foxed because configurations ...

In this blog entry I am going to outline the function of the Value Inclusion profile request in the new Data Profiling Task in SQL Server 2008. BOL states about this profile request: Computes the overlap in the values between two columns or sets of columns. This profile can determine whether a column or set of columns is appropriate to serve ...

In this blog entry I am going to outline the function of the Candidate Key profile request in the new Data Profiling Task in SQL Server 2008. BOL states about this profile request: Reports whether a column or set of columns is a key, or an approximate key, for the selected table. This profile also helps you identify problems in your data, ...

In this blog entry I am going to outline the function of the Functional Dependency profile request in the new Data Profiling Task in SQL Server 2008. BOL states about this profile request: Reports the extent to which the values in one column (the dependent column) depend on the values in another column or set of columns (the determinant ...