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  • SQL Rally Pre-Con: Data Warehouse Modeling – Making the Right Choices

    - by Davide Mauri
    As you may have already learned from my old post or Adam’s or Kalen’s posts, there will be two SQL Rally in North Europe. In the Stockholm SQL Rally, with my friend Thomas Kejser, I’ll be delivering a pre-con on Data Warehouse Modeling: Data warehouses play a central role in any BI solution. It's the back end upon which everything in years to come will be created. For this reason, it must be rock solid and yet flexible at the same time. To develop such a data warehouse, you must have a clear idea of its architecture, a thorough understanding of the concepts of Measures and Dimensions, and a proven engineered way to build it so that quality and stability can go hand-in-hand with cost reduction and scalability. In this workshop, Thomas Kejser and Davide Mauri will share all the information they learned since they started working with data warehouses, giving you the guidance and tips you need to start your BI project in the best way possible?avoiding errors, making implementation effective and efficient, paving the way for a winning Agile approach, and helping you define how your team should work so that your BI solution will stand the test of time. You'll learn: Data warehouse architecture and justification Agile methodology Dimensional modeling, including Kimball vs. Inmon, SCD1/SCD2/SCD3, Junk and Degenerate Dimensions, and Huge Dimensions Best practices, naming conventions, and lessons learned Loading the data warehouse, including loading Dimensions, loading Facts (Full Load, Incremental Load, Partitioned Load) Data warehouses and Big Data (Hadoop) Unit testing Tracking historical changes and managing large sizes With all the Self-Service BI hype, Data Warehouse is become more and more central every day, since if everyone will be able to analyze data using self-service tools, it’s better for him/her to rely on correct, uniform and coherent data. Already 50 people registered from the workshop and seats are limited so don’t miss this unique opportunity to attend to this workshop that is really a unique combination of years and years of experience! http://www.sqlpass.org/sqlrally/2013/nordic/Agenda/PreconferenceSeminars.aspx See you there!

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  • DevWeek & SQL Social @ London

    - by Davide Mauri
    Yesterday I had my “SQL Server best practices for developers” session at DevWeek and I really enjoyed it a lot. For all those who asked, I’ll put slides and demos online as soon as possible. I’ve just waiting to know where I can put it (on my website or somewhere else), so it should be just a matter of some days. If you attended my session and would like to rate it, please use SpeakerRate here: http://speakerrate.com/talks/2857-sql-server-best-practices-for-developers I also have to thank Simon Sabin for the very nice event he organized for SQLSocial http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2010/02/16/SQLSocial-presents-Itzik-Ben-gan--Greg-Low-and-Davide-Mauri.aspx A lot of people attended and we really had interesting discussions. And it was my first time doing a session at a pub, and I must say it's *really* funny and enjoyable, expecially when you have free beer :-) Now back to Italy to the “usual” work! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 05, 2010 -- #831

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Davide Zordan(-2-, -3-), Scott Barnes, Kirupa, Christian Schormann, Tim Heuer, Yavor Georgiev, and Bea Stollnitz. Shoutouts: Yavor Georgiev posted the material for his MIX 2010 talk: what’s new in WCF in Silverlight 4 Erik Mork and crew posted their This Week in Silverlight 4.1.2010 Tim Huckaby and MSDN Bytes interviewed Erik Mork: Silverlight Consulting Life – MSDN Bytes Interview From SilverlightCream.com: Home Loan Application for Windows Phone Rénald Nollet has a WP7 app up, with source, for calculating Home Loan application information. He also discusses some control issues he had with the emulator. Experiments with Multi-touch: A Windows Phone Manipulation sample Davide Zordan has updated the multi-touch project on CodePlex, and added a WP7 sample using multi-touch. Silverlight 4, MEF and MVVM: EventAggregator, ImportingConstructor and Unit Tests Davide Zordan has a second post up on MEF, MVVM, and Prism, oh yeah, and also Unit Testing... the code is available, so take a look at what he's all done with this. Silverlight 4, MEF and MVVM: MEFModules, Dynamic XAP Loading and Navigation Applications Davide Zordan then builds on the previous post and partitions the app into several XAPs put together at runtime with MEF. Silverlight Installation/Preloader Experience - BarnesStyle Scott Barnes talks about the install experience he wanted to get put into place... definitely a good read and lots of information. Changing States using GoToStateAction Kirupa has a quick run-through of Visual States, and then demonstrates using GoToStateAction and a note for a Blend 4 addition. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part IV Christian Schormann has the next tutorial up in his series on Path Layout, and he's explaining Motion Path and Text on a Path. Managing service references and endpoint configurations for Silverlight applications Helping solve a common and much reported problem of managing service references, Tim Heuer details his method of resolving it and additional tips and tricks to boot. Some known WCF issues in Silverlight 4 Yavor Georgiev, a Program Manager for WCF blogged about the issues that they were not able to fix due to scheduling of the release How can I update LabeledPieChart to use the latest toolkit? Bea Stollnitz revisits some of her charting posts to take advantage of the unsealing of toolkit classes in labeling the Chart and PieSeries Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • Excel 2010 & SSAS – Search Dimension Members

    - by Davide Mauri
    Today I’ve connected my Excel 2010 to an Analysis Services 2008 Cube and I got a very nice (and unexpected) surprise! It’s now finally possibly to search and filter Dimension Members directly from the combo box window: As you can easily imagine, for medium/big dimensions is really – really – really useful! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

    - by Davide Mauri
    In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle.  This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE>   <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType>   <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime>   <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID>   <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName>   <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName>   <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName>   <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName>   <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName>   <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName>   <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation     @conversationHandle from service        [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service          '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract         [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with     encryption = off,     lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation     @conversationHandle message type     [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ;     end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

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  • SSAS DMVs: useful links

    - by Davide Mauri
    From time to time happens that I need to extract metadata informations from Analysis Services DMVS in order to quickly get an overview of the entire situation and/or drill down to detail level. As a memo I post the link I use most when need to get documentation on SSAS Objects Data DMVs: SSAS: Using DMV Queries to get Cube Metadata http://bennyaustin.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/ssas-dmv-queries-cube-metadata/ SSAS DMV (Dynamic Management View) http://dwbi1.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/ssas-dmv-dynamic-management-view/ Use Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) to Monitor Analysis Services http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230820.aspx

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  • An OLAP client!

    - by Davide Mauri
    While surfing CodePlex I’ve come across a very interesting tool for all BI Developers who misses a decent OLAP client where to write, run & test MDX queries http://ranetuilibraryolap.codeplex.com/ I’ve not tested it yet, but I’ll surely do this week and I’ll post my impressions ASAP. The first impression, just looking the CodePlex page, is that tool Rocks!!!!! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • The importance of Unit Testing in BI

    - by Davide Mauri
    One of the main steps in the process we internally use to develop a BI solution is the implementation of Unit Test of you BI Data. As you may already know, I’ve create a simple (for now) tool that leverages NUnit to allow us to quickly create Unit Testing without having to resort to use Visual Studio Database Professional: http://queryunit.codeplex.com/ Once you have a tool like this one, you can start also to make sure that your BI solution (DWH and CUBE) is not only structurally sound (I mean, the cube or the report gets processed correctly), but you can also check that the logical integrity of your business rules is enforced. For example let’s say that the customer tell you that they will never create an invoice for a specific product-line in 2010 since that product-line is dismissed and will never be sold again. Ok we know that this in theory is true, but a lot of this business rule effectiveness depends on the fact the people does not do a mistake while inserting new orders/invoices and the ERP used implements a check for this business logic. Unfortunately these last two hypotesis are not always true, so you may find yourself really having some invoices for a product line that doesn’t exists anymore. Maybe this kind of situation in future will be solved using Master Data Management but, meanwhile, how you can give and idea of the data quality to your customers? How can you check that logical integrity of the analytical data you produce is exactly what you expect? Well, Unit Testing of a DWH or a CUBE can be a solution. Once you have defined your test suite, by writing SQL and MDX queries that checks that your data is what you expect to be, if you use NUnit (and QueryUnit does), you can then use a tool like NUnit2Report to create a nice HTML report that can be shipped via email to give information of data quality: In addition to that, since NUnit produces an XML file as a result, you can also import it into a SQL Server Database and then monitor the quality of data over time. I’ll be speaking about this approach (and more in general about how to “engineer” a BI solution) at the next European SQL PASS Adaptive BI Best Practices http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Agenda/ProgramSessions/AdaptiveBIBestPratices.aspx I’ll enjoy discussing with you all about this, so see you there! And remember: “if ain't tested it's broken!” (Sorry I don’t remember how said that in first place :-)) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • SQL Server 2008 R2 Installation and the Phantom of SQL Server 2005 Express

    - by Davide Mauri
    Today I’ve happy started to install SQL Server 2008R2 on my development machine, which has this software installed Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU5 Visual Studio 2008 SP1 BOL October 2009 AdventuresWorks2008 Databases SR4 Visual Studio 2010 RTM So, all the basic standard stuff. SQL Server 2008 R2 installation went smooth ‘till somewhere in the middle, where the rule engine checks that software pre-requisite are satisfied before starting to copy files. Here I had this @][@@[?!?! error: “The SQL Server 2005 Express Tools are installed. To continue, remove the SQL Server 2005 Express Tools.” Fun enough, I don’t have and I’ve never had SQL Server 2005 Express on my machine. Armed with patience I analyzed the install log here C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Log\yyyymmdd_hhmmss\Detail.txt and I’ve found that the rule “Sql2005SsmsExpressFacet” is the one in charge of this check and it look for existance of the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\ShellSEM (on x86) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\ShellSEM (on x64) In my registry I’ve found that key existsing, due to the installation of the uber-cool Red-Gate SQL Search. I removed the registry key and here it is! SQL Server 2008 R2 is installing while I’m writing this post. A note to Microsoft: can you please add more detailed information on the setup while such error happens. Just saying “you have SQL Server 2005 Express installed” is not enough. Please show us what the rule look for and why it has failed directly in the Detailed Report, so that we don’t have to spend time to look for the needle in the logs. Thanks! :) PS I did a side-by-side installation with the existing SQL Server 2008 instance. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • SYS2 Scripts Updated – Scripts to monitor database backup, database space usage and memory grants now available

    - by Davide Mauri
    I’ve just released three new scripts of my “sys2” script collection that can be found on CodePlex: Project Page: http://sys2dmvs.codeplex.com/ Source Code Download: http://sys2dmvs.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/57732 The three new scripts are the following sys2.database_backup_info.sql sys2.query_memory_grants.sql sys2.stp_get_databases_space_used_info.sql Here’s some more details: database_backup_info This script has been made to quickly check if and when backup was done. It will report the last full, differential and log backup date and time for each database. Along with these information you’ll also get some additional metadata that shows if a database is a read-only database and its recovery model: By default it will check only the last seven days, but you can change this value just specifying how many days back you want to check. To analyze the last seven days, and list only the database with FULL recovery model without a log backup select * from sys2.databases_backup_info(default) where recovery_model = 3 and log_backup = 0 To analyze the last fifteen days, and list only the database with FULL recovery model with a differential backup select * from sys2.databases_backup_info(15) where recovery_model = 3 and diff_backup = 1 I just love this script, I use it every time I need to check that backups are not too old and that t-log backup are correctly scheduled. query_memory_grants This is just a wrapper around sys.dm_exec_query_memory_grants that enriches the default result set with the text of the query for which memory has been granted or is waiting for a memory grant and, optionally, its execution plan stp_get_databases_space_used_info This is a stored procedure that list all the available databases and for each one the overall size, the used space within that size, the maximum size it may reach and the auto grow options. This is another script I use every day in order to be able to monitor, track and forecast database space usage. As usual feedbacks and suggestions are more than welcome!

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  • SSIS Expression Tester Tool

    - by Davide Mauri
    Thanks to my friend's Doug blog I’ve found a very nice tool made by fellow MVP Darren Green which really helps to make SSIS develoepers life easier: http://expressioneditor.codeplex.com/Wikipage?ProjectName=expressioneditor In brief the tool allow the testing of SSIS Expression so that one can evaluate and test them before using in SSIS packages. Cool and useful! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • An OLAP client!

    - by Davide Mauri
    While surfing CodePlex I’ve come across a very interesting tool for all BI Developers who misses a decent OLAP client where to write, run & test MDX queries http://ranetuilibraryolap.codeplex.com/ I’ve not tested it yet, but I’ll surely do this week and I’ll post my impressions ASAP. The first impression, just looking the CodePlex page, is that tool Rocks!!!!! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • WCF Error when using “Match Data” function in MDS Excel AddIn

    - by Davide Mauri
    If you’re using MDS and DQS with the Excel Integration you may get an error when trying to use the “Match Data” feature that uses DQS in order to help to identify duplicate data in your data set. The error is quite obscure and you have to enable WCF error reporting in order to have the error details and you’ll discover that they are related to some missing permission in MDS and DQS_STAGING_DATA database. To fix the problem you just have to give the needed permession, as the following script does: use MDS go GRANT SELECT ON mdm.tblDataQualityOperationsState TO [VMSRV02\mdsweb] GRANT INSERT ON mdm.tblDataQualityOperationsState TO [VMSRV02\mdsweb] GRANT DELETE ON mdm.tblDataQualityOperationsState TO [VMSRV02\mdsweb] GRANT UPDATE ON mdm.tblDataQualityOperationsState TO [VMSRV02\mdsweb] USE [DQS_STAGING_DATA] GO ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON SCHEMA::[db_datareader] TO [VMSRV02\mdsweb] ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON SCHEMA::[db_datawriter] TO [VMSRV02\mdsweb] ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON SCHEMA::[db_ddladmin] TO [VMSRV02\mdsweb] GO Where “VMSRV02\mdsweb” is the user you configured for MDS Service execution. If you don’t remember it, you can just check which account has been assigned to the IIS application pool that your MDS website is using:

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  • Master Data Services Employees Sample Model

    - by Davide Mauri
    I’ve been playing with Master Data Services quite a lot in those last days and I’m also monitoring the web for all available resources on it. Today I’ve found this freshly released sample available on MSDN Code Gallery: SQL Server Master Data Services Employee Sample Model http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SSMDSEmployeeSample This sample shows how Recursive Hierarchies can be modeled in order to represent a typical organizational chart scenario where a self-relationship exists on the Employee entity. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • IBM DB2 and the “'DbProviderFactories' section can only appear once per config” error

    - by Davide Mauri
    IBM doesn’t like MS. That’s a fact. And that’s why you can get your machine.config file (!!!) corrupted if you try to install IBM DB2 data providers on your server machine. If at some point, after having installed IBM DB2 data providers your SSIS packages or SSAS cubes or SSRS Reports starts to complain that 'DbProviderFactories' section can only appear once per config you may want to check into you machine.config, located in the %runtime install path%\Config http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229697%28v=vs.71%29.aspx Almost surely you’ll find a IBM DB2 Provider into an additional DbProviderFactories section all alone. Poor guy. Remove the double DBProviderFactories entry, and merge everything inside only one section DBProviderFactories and after that everything will start to work again.

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  • Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

    - by Davide Mauri
    In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle.  This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE>   <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType>   <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime>   <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID>   <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName>   <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName>   <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName>   <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName>   <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName>   <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName>   <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation     @conversationHandle from service        [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service          '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract         [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with     encryption = off,     lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation     @conversationHandle message type     [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ;     end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

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  • SSIS Expression Tester Tool

    - by Davide Mauri
    Thanks to my friend's Doug blog I’ve found a very nice tool made by fellow MVP Darren Green which really helps to make SSIS develoepers life easier: http://expressioneditor.codeplex.com/Wikipage?ProjectName=expressioneditor In brief the tool allow the testing of SSIS Expression so that one can evaluate and test them before using in SSIS packages. Cool and useful! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • DTLoggedExec 1.0 Stable Released!

    - by Davide Mauri
    After serveral years of development I’ve finally released the first non-beta version of DTLoggedExec! I’m now very confident that the product is stable and solid and has all the feature that are important to have (at least for me). DTLoggedExec 1.0 http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/44689 Here’s the release notes: FIRST NON-BETA RELEASE! :) Code cleaned up Added SetPackageInfo method to ILogProvider interface to make easier future improvements Deprecated the arguments 'ProfileDataFlow', 'ProfilePath', 'ProfileFileName' Added the new argument 'ProfileDataFlowFileName' that replaces the old 'ProfileDataFlow', 'ProfilePath', 'ProfileFileName' arguments Updated database scripts to support new reports Split releases in three different packages for easier maintenance and updates: DTLoggedExec Executable, Samples & Reports Fixed Issue #25738 (http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=25738) Fixed Issue #26479 (http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=26479) To make things easier to maintain I’ve divided the original package in three different releases. One is the DTLoggedExec executable; samples and reports are now available in separate packages so that I can update them more frequently without having to touch the engine. Source code of everything is available through Source Code Control: http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets As usual, comments and feebacks are more than welcome! (Just use Codeplex, please, so it will be easier for me to keep track of requests and issues) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • SQL Bits X – Temporal Snapshot Fact Table Session Slide & Demos

    - by Davide Mauri
    Already 10 days has passed since SQL Bits X in London. I really enjoyed it! Those kind of events are great not only for the content but also to meet friends that – due to distance – is not possible to meet every day. Friends from PASS, SQL CAT, Microsoft, MVP and so on all in one place, drinking beers, whisky and having fun. A perfect mixture for a great learning and sharing experience! I’ve also enjoyed a lot delivering my session on Temporal Snapshot Fact Tables. Given that the subject is very specific I was not expecting a lot of attendees….but I was totally wrong! It seems that the problem of handling daily snapshot of data is more common than what I expected. I’ve also already had feedback from several attendees that applied the explained technique to their existing solution with success. This is just what a speaker in such conference wish to hear! :) If you want to take a look at the slides and the demos, you can find them on SkyDrive: https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=377ea1391487af21&resid=377EA1391487AF21!1151&parid=root The demo is available both for SQL Sever 2008 and for SQL Server 2012. With this last version, you can also simplify the ETL process using the new LEAD analytic function. (This is not done in the demo, I’ve left this option as a little exercise for you :) )

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  • SSAS DMVs: useful links

    - by Davide Mauri
    From time to time happens that I need to extract metadata informations from Analysis Services DMVS in order to quickly get an overview of the entire situation and/or drill down to detail level. As a memo I post the link I use most when need to get documentation on SSAS Objects Data DMVs: SSAS: Using DMV Queries to get Cube Metadata http://bennyaustin.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/ssas-dmv-queries-cube-metadata/ SSAS DMV (Dynamic Management View) http://dwbi1.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/ssas-dmv-dynamic-management-view/ Use Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) to Monitor Analysis Services http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh230820.aspx

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  • The importance of Unit Testing in BI

    - by Davide Mauri
    One of the main steps in the process we internally use to develop a BI solution is the implementation of Unit Test of you BI Data. As you may already know, I’ve create a simple (for now) tool that leverages NUnit to allow us to quickly create Unit Testing without having to resort to use Visual Studio Database Professional: http://queryunit.codeplex.com/ Once you have a tool like this one, you can start also to make sure that your BI solution (DWH and CUBE) is not only structurally sound (I mean, the cube or the report gets processed correctly), but you can also check that the logical integrity of your business rules is enforced. For example let’s say that the customer tell you that they will never create an invoice for a specific product-line in 2010 since that product-line is dismissed and will never be sold again. Ok we know that this in theory is true, but a lot of this business rule effectiveness depends on the fact the people does not do a mistake while inserting new orders/invoices and the ERP used implements a check for this business logic. Unfortunately these last two hypotesis are not always true, so you may find yourself really having some invoices for a product line that doesn’t exists anymore. Maybe this kind of situation in future will be solved using Master Data Management but, meanwhile, how you can give and idea of the data quality to your customers? How can you check that logical integrity of the analytical data you produce is exactly what you expect? Well, Unit Testing of a DWH or a CUBE can be a solution. Once you have defined your test suite, by writing SQL and MDX queries that checks that your data is what you expect to be, if you use NUnit (and QueryUnit does), you can then use a tool like NUnit2Report to create a nice HTML report that can be shipped via email to give information of data quality: In addition to that, since NUnit produces an XML file as a result, you can also import it into a SQL Server Database and then monitor the quality of data over time. I’ll be speaking about this approach (and more in general about how to “engineer” a BI solution) at the next European SQL PASS Adaptive BI Best Practices http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Agenda/ProgramSessions/AdaptiveBIBestPratices.aspx I’ll enjoy discussing with you all about this, so see you there! And remember: “if ain't tested it's broken!” (Sorry I don’t remember how said that in first place :-)) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • REPLACENULL in SSIS 2012

    - by Davide Mauri
    While preparing my slides e demos for the forthcoming SQL Server Conference 2012 in Italy, I’ve come across a nice addition to DTS Expression language which I never noticed before and that seems unknown also to the blogosphere: REPLACENULL. REPLACENULL is the same of ISNULL in T-SQL. It’s *very* useful especially when loading a fact table of your BI solution when you need to replace unexisting reference to dimension with dummy values. Here’s an example of how it can be used (please notice that in this example I’m NOT loading a fact table): I’ve noticed that the feature was requested by fellow MVP John Welch http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/636057/ssis-add-a-replacenull-function-to-the-expression-language So: Thanks John and Thanks SSIS Team ! Ah, btw, the Help online is here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh479601(v=sql.110).aspx Enjoy!

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  • Wordpress Installation (on IIS and SQL Server)

    - by Davide Mauri
    To proceed with the installation of Wordpress on SQL Server and IIS, first of all, you need to do the following steps Create a database on SQL Server that will be used by Wordpress Create login that can access to the just created database and put the user into ddladmin, db_datareader, db_datawriter roles Download and unpack Wordpress 3.3.2 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) zip file into a directory of your choice Download the wp-db-abstraction 1.1.4 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) plugin from wordpress.org website Now that the basic action has been done, you can start to setup and configure your Wordpress installation. Unpack and follow the instructions in the README.TXT file to install the Database Abstraction Layer. Mainly you have to: Upload wp-db-abstraction.php and the wp-db-abstraction directory to wp-content/mu-plugins.  This should be parallel to your regular plugins directory.  If the mu-plugins directory does not exist, you must create it. Put the db.php file from inside the wp-db-abstraction.php directory to wp-content/db.php Now you can create an application pool in IIS like the following one Create a website, using the above Application Pool, that points to the folder where you unpacked Wordpress files. Be sure to give the “Write” permission to the IIS account, as pointed out in this (old, but still quite valid) installation manual: http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#iis Now you’re ready to go. Point your browser to the configured website and the Wordpress installation screen will be there for you. When you’re requested to enter information to connect to MySQL database, simply skip that page, leaving the default values. If you have installed the Database Abstraction Layer, another database installation screen will appear after the one used by MySQL, and here you can enter the configuration information needed to connect to SQL Server. After having finished the installation steps, you should be able to access and navigate your wordpress site.  A final touch, and it’s done: just add the needed rewrite rules http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#urlrewrite and that’s it! Well. Not really. Unfortunately the current (as of 27 May 2012) version of the Database Abstraction Layer (1.1.4) has some bugs. Luckily they can be quickly fixed: Backslash Fix http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-db-abstraction-fix-problems-with-backslash-usage Select Top 0 Fix Make the change to the file “.\wp-content\mu-plugins\wp-db-abstraction\translations\sqlsrv\translations.php” suggested by “debettap”   http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3485384&group_id=315685&atid=1328061 And now you have a 100% working Wordpress installation on SQL Server! Since I also wanted to take advantage of SQL Server Full Text Search, I’ve created a very simple wordpress plugin to setup full-text search and to use it as website search engine: http://wpfts.codeplex.com/ Enjoy!

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  • SSIS Dashboard v0.4

    - by Davide Mauri
    Following the post on SSISDB script on Gist, I’ve been working on a HTML5 SSIS Dashboard, in order to have a nice looking, user friendly and, most of all, useful, SSIS Dashboard. Since this is a “spare-time” project, I’ve decided to develop it using Python since it’s THE data language (R aside), it’s a beautiful & powerful, well established and well documented and with a rich ecosystem around. Plus it has full support in Visual Studio, through the amazing Python Tools For Visual Studio plugin, I decided also to use Flask, a very good micro-framework to create websites, and use the SB Admin 2.0 Bootstrap admin template, since I’m all but a Web Designer. The result is here: https://github.com/yorek/ssis-dashboard and I can say I’m pretty satisfied with the work done so far (I’ve worked on it for probably less than 24 hours). Though there’s some features I’d like to add in t future (historical execution time, some charts, connection with AzureML to do prediction on expected execution times) it’s already usable. Of course I’ve tested it only on my development machine, so check twice before putting it in production but, give the fact that, virtually, there is not installation needed (you only need to install Python), and that all queries are based on standard SSISDB objects, I expect no big problems. If you want to test, contribute and/or give feedback please fell free to do it…I would really love to see this little project become a community project! Enjoy!

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  • Auto-Configuring SSIS Packages

    - by Davide Mauri
    SSIS Package Configurations are very useful to make packages flexible so that you can change objects properties at run-time and thus make the package configurable without having to open and edit it. In a complex scenario where you have dozen of packages (even in in the smallest BI project I worked on I had 50 packages), each package may have its own configuration needs. This means that each time you have to run the package you have to pass the correct Package Configuration. I usually use XML configuration files and I also force everyone that works with me to make sure that an object that is used in several packages has the same name in all package where it is used, in order to simplify configurations usage. Connection Managers are a good example of one of those objects. For example, all the packages that needs to access to the Data Warehouse database must have a Connection Manager named DWH. Basically we define a set of “global” objects so that we can have a configuration file for them, so that it can be used by all packages. If a package as some specific configuration needs, we create a specific – or “local” – XML configuration file or we set the value that needs to be configured at runtime using DTLoggedExec’s Package Parameters: http://dtloggedexec.davidemauri.it/Package%20Parameters.ashx Now, how we can improve this even more? I’d like to have a package that, when it’s run, automatically goes “somewhere” and search for global or local configuration, loads it and applies it to itself. That’s the basic idea of Auto-Configuring Packages. The “somewhere” is a SQL Server table, defined in this way In this table you’ll put the values that you want to be used at runtime by your package: The ConfigurationFilter column specify to which package that configuration line has to be applied. A package will use that line only if the value specified in the ConfigurationFilter column is equal to its name. In the above sample. only the package named “simple-package” will use the line number two. There is an exception here: the $$Global value indicate a configuration row that has to be applied to any package. With this simple behavior it’s possible to replicate the “global” and the “local” configuration approach I’ve described before. The ConfigurationValue contains the value you want to be applied at runtime and the PackagePath contains the object to which that value will be applied. The ConfiguredValueType column defined the data type of the value and the Checksum column is contains a calculated value that is simply the hash value of ConfigurationFilter plus PackagePath so that it can be used as a Primary Key to guarantee uniqueness of configuration rows. As you may have noticed the table is very similar to the table originally used by SSIS in order to put DTS Configuration into SQL Server tables: SQL Server SSIS Configuration Type: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141682.aspx Now, how it works? It’s very easy: you just have to call DTLoggedExec with the /AC option: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /AC:"localhost;ssis_auto_configuration;ssiscfg.configuration" the AC option expects a string with the following format: <database_server>;<database_name>;<table_name>; only Windows Authentication is supported. When DTLoggedExec finds an Auto-Configuration request, it injects a new connection manager in the loaded package. The injected connection manager is named $$DTLoggedExec_AutoConfigure and is used by the two SQL Server DTS Configuration ($$DTLoggedExec_Global and $$DTLoggedExec_Local) also injected by DTLoggedExec, used to load “local” and “global” configuration. Now, you may start to wonder why this approach cannot be used without having all this stuff going around, but just passing to a package always two XML DTS Configuration files, (to have to “local” and the “global” configurations) doing something like this: DTLoggedExec.exe /FILE:”mypackage.dtsx” /CONF:”global.dtsConfig” /CONF:”mypackage.dtsConfig” The problem is that this approach doesn’t work if you have, in one of the two configuration file, a value that has to be applied to an object that doesn’t exists in the loaded package. This situation will raise an error that will halt package execution. To solve this problem, you may want to create a configuration file for each package. Unfortunately this will make deployment and management harder, since you’ll have to deal with a great number of configuration files. The Auto-Configuration approach solve all these problems at once! We’re using it in a project where we have hundreds of packages and I can tell you that deployment of packages and their configuration for the pre-production and production environment has never been so easy! To use the Auto-Configuration option you have to download the latest DTLoggedExec release: http://dtloggedexec.codeplex.com/releases/view/62218 Feedback, as usual, are very welcome!

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