A Hostname Alias SQL Server instance is a simple Hostname that allows clients to connect to an instance of SQL Server without specifying an instance name or a port number. They are very useful for upgrades, server migration, consolidation, and disaster...

SQL Server Fast Track Reference Architecture is a set of prescriptive hardware configurations and operational practices for building large data warehouses on SQL Server. There are reference configurations ranging from a few terabytes to 40TB and more...

  In the previous post in this series on using the MDS Utilities CodePlex project ( http://mdsutilities.codeplex.com/ ) to jump-start and MDS implementation  we created a simple MDS model by importing table and relationship definitions from...

I’ve been working with a number of customers to implement SQL Server Master Data Services, and found some common requests from customers that require some custom code to implement. Over the course of those engagements I wrote a set of utilities...

Here’s how to run SSIS packages on a remote server using PowerShell 2.0 and PowerShell remoting. This post is short, since this is so incredibly easy. First install PowerShell 2.0. For Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, these are in the box...

When you are connecting to a web service from an SSIS Script component or transform using a WCF client, the normal method of configuring the WCF client from the application configuration file doesn’t work well. Your package will be running in some...

In SQL Server members of the local administrators group are often configured to log in as sysadmins. A sysadmin, of course, has complete control of the SQL Server instance. Some people remove the local administrators login from SQL Server to prevent access...

Hopefully you are familiar with the greatness of the TransactionScope class in .NET. It provides implicit ambient transaction handling, which can greatly simplify transaction handling in your code. But this ease of use comes with a significant caveat...

Most developers building an OLTP system know that you should declare and enforce relationships between tables using Foreign Keys. But what physical database structures should you implement to support those relationships? Every Foreign Key is a relationship...

There's lots of blog posts out there on how to get your SQL Server BI environment to talk to Oracle, but lot's of it is a bit incomplete, so I'm going to take a crack an publishing a complete guide. I'll start with installing the Oracle client and getting...