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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 ...

Here's a useful page to keep an eye on: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms403408.aspx. It lists the current features within SSIS that will be disappearing in future versions and the strongest message I take from it is that you should upgrade your existing DTS packages from SSIS sooner rather than later. Currently it also makes ...

Well it isn't likely to cause quite the same stir as Y2K but I thought it was a significant date for everyone's diaries... On the 8th April 2008 Microsoft withdraws mainstream support for SQL Server 2000. Look here if you don't believe me.  That's not very far away at all.  This gives everyone who is currently ...

For those of you interested in what's new in SSIS in service pack 2, here are a couple of resources: New Features: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/B/5/2B5E5D37-9B17-423D-BC8F-B11ECD4195B4/WhatsNewSQL2005SP2.htm#BKMK_IntegrationServices Bug fixes: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/921896 Note that in SP1 there were alot ...

In case you hadn't picked this up on the grapevine already, Microsoft and Bob Beauchemin SQL Skills have jointly released a whitepaper that talks about connectivity issues that you may come across in SSIS. Check it out here: http://ssis.wik.is/Connectivity_White_Paper   -Jamie  

I have just received an email from Donald Farmer, Group Program Manager for SSIS, who took great delight in telling me that his product has claimed the title of "Best ETL Software" in the Techweb Readers' Choice Awards. I don't usually take much notive of award ceremonies (those god-awful celeb-kiss-@rse award ...

Here is the next in my series of posts explaining how common tasks in DTS can now be implemented in SSIS.Use multiple connection objects in order to maintain seperate connections to a database It was commonly recommended in DTS that a package should contain multiple connection objects pointing to the same database if you had multiple ...

Many people like to use stored procedures as the source of data for the SSIS pipeline. In theory there is nothing wrong with that however it does have its complications. Depending on the way the stored procedure is written, it may or may not be suitable to be used in this way. Namely, it is possible to preview the data being returned from a stored ...

About a month ago I wrote this very simple blog post explaining how one might go about stripping off the last word from a sentance in the pipeline. My Conchango colleague James Saull thought that this would be ripe for a regular expression (and he's right) and asked if we could we apply regular expressions in SSIS. The answer is ...

I've been writing about SSIS for quite some time now and probably one of the more popular articles post I have written is this one: Get all from Table A that isn't in Table B (http://www.sqlis.com/default.aspx?311) which I wrote way back in 2004. Its not popular because of the quality of the writing, oh no. Its because of the subject ...