Today I come into a nice bug (misfeature?) of SSIS 2008 and I’d like to share it with you. Let’s start from the beginning: One of the keys to make something speedy is to parallelize it. In TableDifference I read from two inputs, compare them and produce  Read more

Playing with SSIS I normally have to read flat files that come in zip format. The standard procedure here is to launch winzip, decompress the file, read it with a flat file adapter and then delete the uncompressed file. This behaviour generates a lot  Read more

Table difference is an SSIS custom component designed to simplify the management of slowly changing dimensions and – in general – to check the differences between two tables or data flow with SSIS. Its main advantage over Microsoft standard SCD component  Read more

The new version 2.0 of SSIS SCD handling component TableDifference is in beta, I am searching for beta testers and some help in writing an installer for it. You will find all the informations at www.sqlbi.eu . The final release of the component will be  Read more

Today I was optimizing a package that handles a very common topic: process some rows and send all them to a flow but, for some of them, make additional processing. A simple Multicast and a Conditional Split solve the problem, the picture explains it better  Read more

Visio database models have column descriptions, SQL Server has extended properties where to store them but, even if they share the same producer, it seems that Visio is unable to store column descriptions in extended properties so that other tools can  Read more

If you have two columns in a table that “remember” their old values in two different historical tables, as it is the case in AdventureWorks with EmployeePayHistory and EmployeeDepartmentHistory, you may need (or just wonder how) to merge these two tables  Read more

A ranged dimension is a dimension that is used to have a discrete view of a continuous measure. A good example of this is the analysis of amount sold per order. In AdventureWorks we have, for each line of an order, the amount and quantity sold. We would  Read more

Today I ran into a nice problem with SQL Server fancy way of sorting GUIDS. I know, there should be no reason at all to sort GUID columns but, if what you need is run two tables side by side to check whether they are aligned or not (this is the task of  Read more

TableDifference has been updated to version 1.2. For those who want to read the main description of the component can be found here but take a look at the full story, this component and the documentaton has been updated several times. You will find complete  Read more