It’s Hall of Fame season again!

Let's Go Tribe has an excellent breakdown of the new 2015 HOF Ballot. They have both the first timers and the guys who have been on the ballot for a while. Jay Jaffe's breakdown is even more detailed and awesome, because he's Jay Jaffe and is rapidly becoming my favorite baseball writer. The inner asshole in…

BIML, Part 6—Lookups

Last time around, we built a BIML package which generates one data flow per table we wish to migrate. Before loading the customer's data, we needed to delete existing data for that customer. This works fine with a toy database, but once you're talking about millions or billions of rows of data in fact tables,…

Time To Say Goodbye

The last time I bought tennis shoes was eight years ago.   Actually,  these were running shoes I bought to exercise in the Black Forest.  Since then, these shoes have served me well over the course of three continents and a lot of miles.  I finally bought their replacement today.  I could deal with the holes…

I decided to bite the bullet and pay for custom themes.  I've been using the free version of WordPress for eight years, but being able to fix some theme annoyances is worth it. I might make further tweaks, but so far, I've been able to approximately triple the size of the main post box for…

Tracing Foreign Key Dependencies In SQL Server

In my latest post on using BIML, I created a table called MigrationStep and populated it with data. Now I want to show how exactly I generated that data and how you can find foreign key constraints. Let's use the AdventureWorksDW2012 database as an example and look at the thirteen tables we identified as being…

We've just switched over to a new WordPress theme.  The theme that we initially set up worked great for us back in 2006, because it was one of the few WordPress themes which showed you the author's name in each post.  Over time, however, it's gotten a bit stale and was never really designed for…

Generating An Empty Node

In BIML, Part 5, I talked about AdventureWorksDW2012 and AdventureWorksDW2012Node2. If you don't know how to create an empty node for testing, it's pretty easy. For this example, I'm going to assume that you have SQL Server 2012 or 2014 installed. If you're still on 2008 R2 or earlier, this will still work but you'll…

BIML, Part 5—Expanding To Multiple Tables

In my last post on the topic, we walked through the BIML necessary to generate an SSIS package. The end result is useful and allows us to treat SSIS packages as binary code rather than source code, but the real power to BIML is in automation. In this case, I want to automate every relevant…

Speaking At The SQL Pass Chapter

I will be speaking at the Triangle area SQL Server User Group tomorrow night---that is, Tuesday, November 18th. My topic is Hadoop, a talk I've given a couple of times. My slides and code are available, but if you're in the Raleigh area tomorrow, stop on by.

BIML, Part 4—Implementing The Ideal Package

My last post in the BIML series introduced an SSIS package which would form the basis of our correct solution. Given this baseline, I want to write some BIML to generate our single package; that way, we can eventually expand our package to include more complex logic and solve the our problem. For the rest…