My main customer utilizes SSIS for some SQL and Oracle integration requirements. One challenge they’ve had is timeouts from the Oracle side. We’ve tried everything to eliminate the issue in terms of extending timeout values within SSIS, but the problem appears to be that for very large data...

Here’s a quick tip if you don’t want to try to use random and figure out seed, etc.  If you’ve got a lot of columns in a table, it is pretty likely that the checksum for all those data values are going to be random across your primary keys. I recently needed to create a 5% random sample of my equities...

This weekend I played with partitioning.  I have a table with about 10 million rows spanning the last 6 years of stock history for AMEX, NYSE, Indexes, and NASDAQ.   I partitioned each year into a separate filegroup so that should make it much easier to purge archive the old years and...

With SQL Server 2008, Microsoft re-architected SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to no longer have an IIS dependency. It now relies directly on HTTP.SYS and handles web protocols independently. This is a good thing, in a lot of respects (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb630410.aspx )...

If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember an article I did extolling the virtues of indexed views - http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoftbob/archive/2009/05/13/sql-data-warehousing-tip-2-indexed-views.aspx .  I stand behind that and have found this feature extremely useful.  In fact in my...

Some of you are all set to flame me just because of my title. I know because a couple of years back, I would have probably been one of the first to say “NO!”, when anybody started talking about query hints. But, like everything else in this world, they have their place. First of all, I encourage you...

I confess  lack of depth in SQL Analysis Services (SSAS).  I've read quite a bit about the capabilities including data mining, and played with a couple of the wizards, but just haven't had time to immerse deeply into end-to-end scenarios.  Based on that, I'm writing this post with a big...

As part of my research work, I generate thousands of simulations on an almost daily basis for various scenarios.  One of my scenarios involves determining strategies for selecting the most profitable short and long stock entry/exit positions.  Calculating this involves data mining stock history...

Coming back from the Sci-Fi world of AI, etc to some real world scenarios...  Earlier I posted a generic stored procedure that automatically unpivots data so that columns become rows.  Today, I provide the inverse capability, although not truly generic at this point, but the technique is generic...

Technorati Tags: SQL Server , Tips If you’re like me and spend a lot of time in SQL Query Analyzer, querying data directly, you may find the column display format tedious for tables with lots of columns or where you are only working with a couple of entries in the table anyways. Consider the following...

Place holder for Data Model Monitor

Have you ever been asked by a high-level architect or CIO what Microsoft's approach is to a given scenario?  If you have, then you know the challenges faced because as you read through MSDN and TechNet and even at the Microsoft.com site level, you find a lot of material which is very large and complex...