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About 3.5 years ago I was introduced to Agile at the Agile 2006 Conference. After that, and implementing it in a software dev environment, I found that it just works. Sprints, Scrums, Stories, Backlog, Velocity, all the pieces fit and work.
Now that I am managing a Business Intelligence group, which when I started wasn’t doing [...]

Figured out today that in SSRS, if you add a filter to your dataset, and you want to use “Like”, that the operand for everything is * instead of % like you might be used to in SQL, sometimes it is just the little things :)

In many shops, I am guessing there are multiple servers. Development, Production, maybe a Staging, etc.
With SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), you set up data sources, connection to databases. In SSAS you usually have a connection which then you build your data source view off of, and in [...]

Last night I configured up SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) on a test box. It looks good so far. I ran into a few issues with the box/setup that I had to tweak in order to get it working. I had to allow “handlers” and “modules” in the applicationHost config on the machine. IIS [...]

Just updated my work laptop to Windows 7. Sweet right? Except now the fun of getting everything to work.
First issue I ran into, a Web App in development, not being able to load up “Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClient” because it was looking for version “9.0.242.0″ – the version you get with Office 2007, SQL 2005. But I have [...]

SQL 2005 introduced DDL Triggers, where you could catch events on your DDL statements in SQL, and hopefully most DBA’s are catching them, at least to a table and have some kind of report on who is adding, changing and deleting what objects.
What I wanted to do was capture that, but also keep and automatic [...]

I use SQL Agent a ton. It is like my go to place to schedule jobs and tasks. Problem is, there are pieces “missing”. Like if a job hangs, you can have it auto stop after a given amount of time. It doesn’t alert on changes to a job, etc, etc.
I asked on twitter what [...]

Crazy error today. In Analysis Services, (SSAS), some jobs got hung, sync command got hung, and what ended up happening is a cube on the default instance was totally unusable.
Try to delete, rename, resync, redeploy, anything, and I would get the error..
Errors in the metadata manager. The dimension with ID of..
Couldn’t do anything. [...]

Sometimes you have some pretty complex ETL’s going in SSIS, and you might have multiple projects/solutions that need to call other SSIS Packages or SQL Agent Jobs and you have a pretty big production going on. You might have an ETL solution that needs to kick off other packages, and you can either import those [...]

Sometimes, I just wonder why things that are useful in previous versions of things get removed. In SQL 2000, in DTS, there was an ODBC destination, you could write (insert, update, etc) to a foreign (non MSFT SQL) system easily. DB2 – no prob, MySQL – heck yea. For whatever reason, in SQL 2005 Integration [...]