When you install SQL 2008 R2 workstation components you get a newer version of BIDS (BI Developer Studio, included in the workstation components) that replaces BIDS 2008 version (BIDS 2005 still live side-by-side). Everything would be good if you can  Read more

Even this year I will be a speaker at the European PASS Conference 2009 (April 22-24, 2009 - Neuss, Germany). Last year I had a session discussing the Many-to-Many Revolution paper. This year I'm excited to introduce the SQLBI Methodology joining Alberto  Read more

If you try to use the WITH clause in a SQL Command of an OLE DB Source in a Data Flow of Integration Services, you might receive the error 'Statement(s) could not be prepared'. Solution: put a semicolon (;) just before the WITH keyword.  Read more

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

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

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

It seems that Microsoft will not improve the slow SCD component that is part of SSIS (at least, this is what I understand from this Microsoft Connect answer ). This means that TableDifference has a long life because it will be useful even in SQL Server  Read more

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that Microsoft should still improve in many ways. I thought about this many times before writing this post, because I want to be constructive and I hope that my words will not be misunderstood. My consideration  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting post about the need of more properties to control the behavior of a Merge component in Integration Services (SSIS). This apparent simple problem becomes very important in large data warehouses. I hope that someone  Read more