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I recently had to investigated a client replication topology.  I needed to understand the publications, subscribers and the articles. The problems I was facing were as follows: The replication topology was only defined on the production infrastructure. There was no documentation about the replication topology. I had no way of ...

In October 2009 I created 2 codeplex projects which I would to tell you about: SQL Server Reporting Services MSBuild Tasks (ssrsmsbuildtasks) A few years ago I created some tasks for MSBuild to help deploy reports for my project, details can be found here,  since then my tasks have been re-used in a few other projects within my ...

I have been working with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, since its first release, within many of my projects.  One of the biggest tasks, that I find with writing a report is the testing the reports and making sure the data that is displayed is correct.  My method of developing and testing reports is as follows: Write the ...

This is a Public Service Announcement.  Attunity makers of all things connect-y for SSIS are putting on a webinar for their latest product Oracle CDC for SSIS. It’s an enabling solution that accelerates the development of real time data integration with Oracle systems. The event is to be held online on Monday, June 22, 2009 10:00 AM - ...

A couple of years ago I worked on an issue with my colleague Steve Wright about an issue with merge replication.  You can read Steve’s original post here.  However, in summary, the issue boiled down to a security check that merge replication was performing in a generated view called ...

News about SQL Data Services has been thin on the ground since the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in October 2008. The official SDS blog has been dormant since 27th October (up until then it had been a very active blog) and the same is largely true of blogs from various SDS team members. It points to there being some sweeping changes ...

[I had to call this out because I think its a cool example of what can be done with SSDS.] Mike Amundsen is a guy that really grasped the SSDS nettle. First he built the SSDS provisioning client (http://amundsen.com/examples/ssds/data-client/) and now he's built a simple application that is basically a Twitter clone, see it at ...

AAAaaaaah...Yesterday was just one of those days.  I was trying to do something very simple in a script task - assign the current datetime value to one of my variables - and was pulling my stubbly hair out trying to do it. I am happy to confess to not being the strongest .netter in the world but we do also in SSIS get a pretty pony script ...

So as suspected when I installed the new Security patch released by Microsoft for SQL 2005 sp2 that I mentioned this morning my build number has indeed shot up to 3233.  This places me somewhere between CU6 and CU7. Build 9.00.3228 was CU6 and 9.00.3239 is CU7. So just bear in mind that when you plop on your patch you are actually taking a ...

And so the great run comes to an end... For the full details of this incident please click here. N.B. This also affects Windows. However this is released under a different KB article. For the SQL 2005 sp2 KB article look at this link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948108 For SQL 2000 GDR and MSDE 2000 KB article look at this one ...