If you're reading this, you've probably heard about Project Gemini, the Self Service Analysis capabilities to be delivered as part of SQL Server Kilimanjaro. It's great to be able to finally share some details about what we've been working so hard on...

Hi folks, It's been a while since I posted. I'm back in the Analysis Services team now where we've been busy finishing off SQL Server 2008 and working on a set of technologies that will be unveiled at the BI Conference. I remember a conference back...

For the past few months, a few of us have had the pleasure of working with Ordinal to create an extremely performant sort component. Chris, from Ordinal, sent an email earlier today announcing that they're done with a production ready version. This...

Hi again, Over the last few months a lot of you have expressed a need to do impact analysis and lineage investigations across the different BI components we've got.... if I change this table here what packages, cubes, reports will be affected. Well...

This is a FAQ that we get at least once every time we present. I got it last week doing launch activities in Portugal, and then earlier today on a webcast on extending SSIS. For those not familiar with the excellent whitepaper on this, check this one...

As you know, we just declared SQL RTM earlier today. For those familiar with the changes in this release, my goodness. This has been a huge release. I've had a kid along the way, some have had two. Shipping software of this magnitude is probably one...

Ever want to do a lookup on a text file without putting it in a database or using a merge join? Grant from the Project REAL team found a great nugget: Openrowset now allows the BULK clause to be specified which accepts a filename and format specification...

Earlier today Fred S. asked a great question. "Using the following data I’m trying to get each node Element populated into their own variables. XML: <DataBases> <DataBase> <Name>Sales</Name> <Action>DBCC</Action>...

This has come up a few times recently, and I couldn't find the information for them in the usual sources. The desire that some folks have is to support parameters in their SQL statements. Sounds reasonable. The OLEDB source, for example, supports parameters...

We've been slowly creating a list of best practices. Simon asked me about these at the PDC a couple of weeks back. It's time to share them out not just to make folks aware of them but also to solicit other goodness you'd like us to include in the official...

One of our ISVs ran into an issue that others writing managed code interoping with COM (nothing to do with SSIS directly) might run into. At some unpredictable time, he got an error message with the title of this blog entry while working in the designer...

Over the last few days I've learnt a lot in how to debug SQL hangs thanks to Sunil from the SQL Server engine team. For one of the customers last week, the problem seemed to be that their DTS2000 package worked great with SQL2000. However, upgrading...

It's typical in data warehouse loads to have lookups that go against dimension tables. If the key doesn't exist, either a new one is created, or a default value is used. There're two ways to do this: 1. Lookup is configured to redirect rows that...

It's finally that part of the release when you see the end of the tunnel and there seems a good reason (or close to it) that your hair has lost more color this cycle.... we're close to shipping! With that, of course, the marketing machine churns faster...

At PDC this year, Sergei and I will be presenting a session on how to extend Integration Services. This is a 400 level course so will go into more details than the 300 level webcast I did earlier this week for MSDN. Sergei has been the developer who...

At 1PM PST today, I'll be doing an MSDN Webcast on how to extend Integration Services including how to write new tasks and create new components. Why would you want to do that? Well, the simplest example would be if you have binary files that only you...

Hi there, I'm a member of the SQL Server Integration Services team and previously had a blog here: sqljunkies . Last week I ran into issues posting there and thought I'd try out this site instead. Since I work to integrate technologies, getting...

Bulk loading into a table that already has records is a common scenario. A lot of folks ask how can they optimize this, and besides the standard 'it depends' answer, there's a BOL topic that gives useful information on what to do depending on how large...

Ethan from AMB Dataminers had a great question about how to do logging through his pipeline component. One way to do it is to call the Fire* methods that's on the IDTSComponentMetadata90. However, that does incur the cost of basically firing an...