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Well here we are, I promised in my last post that I would let you know how my studying was going on and also share with everyone anything I find of interest in the course of my studies. I have now done the first 4 chapters of the book which are all focused on SSIS before moving onto both the areas of SSAS and SSRS required by the syllabus.  ...

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 ...

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 - ...

[If you’re using SSIS to pull data out of Oracle then this may be of interest to you.] In SQL Server 2008 Microsoft introduced a feature called Change Data Capture (CDC) which basically enables you to query a SQL Server table from within SSIS and ask for all rows that have been created or changed since a given point-in-time. Attunity have now ...

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 ...

I have noticed a few fellow SQL bloggers over on SQLBlog.com (most notably Aaron Bertrand) have started to use their blog to draw attention to various submissions to Microsoft Connect that they believe to be worthy of attention. I think this a great idea, the more attention that are paid to Connect items the better hence I’m going to start calling ...

I’ve just received my session feedback for my SSIS Nuggets Live session at SQLBits 4 which happened 7 days ago. I’m quite pleased with the marks I received but moreover I had some great written feedback as well, some of which I’ll take the opportunity to address here: “Many presenters appear to have issues with connecting laptops to ...