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One of my pet peeves about stored procedures is the lack of clarity they provide a user on the data types of returned columns.  This is especially applicable when the column returned has been calculated. Consider a statement such as this SELECT 10.0/5. It’s not obvious what that data type is. Now consider the fact that as the SQL developer I ...

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 ...

Its been a long-g-g-g-g time since I did a SSIS-related post so here’s a little ditty that I picked up while reviewing some internal stuff today. Editing SSIS configuration (i.e. .dtsConfig) files isn’t particularly easy. Most people I see who try to do this use a traditional text editor like Notepad but that isn’t a great experience because the ...

Here is the latest collection of submissions to http://connect.microsoft.com/sqlserver/feedback that pertain to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and which I think are worthy of your attention. Take a read of the items below and if you agree with the aim of the submission, please click through and vote for it – it only takes a few seconds. ...

Of late one may have noticed that I have become very interested in high-brow, generally vaporous, disciplines such as RESTful data services, data interoperability and cloud computing whilst coincident with that has been the inexorable rise of the term “mashup” in the information technology lexicon. “Mashup” means different things to different ...

I’ve noticed some confusion in the community over the mythical “4000 character limit” in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and thought it may be worth clarifying the situation. The most common misconception I hear is “A SSIS string variable has a maximum length of 4000 characters”. This isn’t true and its easy to prove; simply create a ...

Applications hosted on Windows Azure will create log files and given that we don’t have access to the running app instances the log files are the only means available to us for debugging and problem resolution so they’re a very important part of the whole service. Recently I wanted to take a look at the log files for my Tweetpoll Azure application ...

[Although I colloquially refer to myself on this blog as “SSIS Junkie” it won’t have escaped the notice of regular readers that I haven’t been talking about SSIS much lately, in fact nothing of real substance in regard to SSIS has appeared here since Nesting variables to calculate values on 24th October. The reason for that is that I simply ...

When casting to a non-unicode textual value (i.e. DT_STR) in SSIS you might often have seen something like the following: (DT_STR, 50, 1252) (<expression>) and wondered what on earth the 1252 was referring to. Well the SSIS documentation on MSDN tells us that that third parameter is the code page to be used for the cast but we may ...

I was looking over a package today that a colleague had built and it contained the following code in a Script Task that was being used to return today’s day name: Public Sub Main() ' Dim sWeekday As String sWeekday = Now().DayOfWeek.ToString Dts.Variables(''User::DayName'').Value = sWeekday ...