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• Developing add-ins for multiple versions of Office

  - by Pranav

  Do you want to develop an add-in targeting multiple versions of Office? And you have basic questions like “Is it possible to do? ” and “How to do it?” ? Then you came to the right place. Few months back, I got a requirement to developed add-ins for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. The functionality for both the versions is same. A doubt stroked… when the functionality is same, why would I develop two add-ins separately? Why don’t I make a single build for both the versions of Office? Then I started searching for techniques to develop add-ins which works in both (2003 and 2007) and read many articles written by VSTO Experts in their blogs, Official VSTO Blog, MSDN, Forums and what not. Misha Says: Theoretically, you can develop an add-in for multiple versions of Microsoft Office by catering to the lowest common denominator. This means if you use an Excel 2003 add-in template in Visual Studio 2008, you would be able to develop and debug this with Excel 2007. However if you try this, you may meet these error messages: “You cannot debug or run this project, because the required version of the Microsoft Office application is not installed.”, followed by “Unable to start debugging.” You can develop Office 2003 add-in in a system where Office 2007 is installed. The following is the procedure that demonstrates how to update your Visual Studio debugging options to use Microsoft Outlook 2007 to debug an add-in targeting Microsoft Outlook 2003. On the Project menu, click on ProjectName Properties Click on the Debug tab In the Start Action pane, click the Start external program radio button Click the file browser button and navigate to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office12 Choose Outlook.exe and click Open Press F5 to debug your add-in For more details. Go through this article in Misha Shneerson’s Blog. There are some tips and tricks to be followed and the things that one needs to take care while developing add-ins targeting multiple versions of Office in Andrew’s Blog. Have a look at this too. You might find it interesting and useful. http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2007/06/15/can-you-build-one-add-in-for-multiple-versions-of-office.aspx Here is an MSDN article on Running Solutions in Different Versions of Microsoft Office http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772080.aspx Hope this helps!

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• Working with Reporting Services Filters – Part 3: The TOP and BOTTOM Operators

  - by smisner

  Thus far in this series, I have described using the IN operator and the LIKE operator. Today, I’ll continue the series by reviewing the TOP and BOTTOM operators. Today, I happened to be working on an example of using the TOP N operator and was not successful on my first try because the behavior is just a bit different than we find when using an “equals” comparison as I described in my first post in this series. In my example, I wanted to display a list of the top 5 resellers in the United States for AdventureWorks, but I wanted it based on a filter. I started with a hard-coded filter like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [ResellerSalesAmount] Float Top N 5 And received the following error: A filter value in the filter for tablix 'Tablix1' specifies a data type that is not supported by the 'TopN' operator. Verify that the data type for each filter value is Integer. Well, that puzzled me. Did I really have to convert ResellerSalesAmount to an integer to use the Top N operator? Just for kicks, I switched to the Top % operator like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [ResellerSalesAmount] Float Top % 50 This time, I got exactly the results I expected – I had a total of 10 records in my dataset results, so 50% of that should yield 5 rows in my tablix. So thinking about the problem with Top N some  more, I switched the Value to an expression, like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [ResellerSalesAmount] Float Top N =5 And it worked! So the value for Top N or Top % must reflect a number to plug into the calculation, such as Top 5 or Top 50%, and the expression is the basis for determining what’s in that group. In other words, Reporting Services will sort the rows by the expression – ResellerSalesAmount in this case – in descending order, and then filter out everything except the topmost rows based on the operator you specify. The curious thing is that, if you’re going to hard-code the value, you must enter the value for Top N with an equal sign in front of the integer, but you can omit the equal sign when entering a hard-coded value for Top %. This experience is why working with Reporting Services filters is not always intuitive! When you use a report parameter to set the value, you won’t have this problem. Just be sure that the data type of the report parameter is set to Integer. Jessica Moss has an example of using a Top N filter in a tablix which you can view here. Working with Bottom N and Bottom % works similarly. You just provide a number for N or for the percentage and Reporting Services works from the bottom up to determine which rows are kept and which are excluded.

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• Kill all the project files!

  - by jamiet

  Like many folks I’m a keen podcast listener and yesterday my commute was filled by listening to Scott Hunter being interviewed on .Net Rocks about the next version of ASP.Net. One thing Scott said really struck a chord with me. I don’t remember the full quote but he was talking about how the ASP.Net project file (i.e. the .csproj file) is going away. The rationale being that the main purpose of that file is to list all the other files in the project, and that’s something that the file system is pretty good at. In Scott’s own words (that someone helpfully put in the comments): A file that lists files is really redundant when the OS already does this Romeliz Valenciano correctly pointed out on Twitter that there will still be a project.json file however no longer will there be a need to keep a list of files in a project file. I suspect project.json will simply contain a list of exclusions where necessary rather than the current approach where the project file is a list of inclusions. On the face of it this seems like a pretty good idea. I’ve long been a fan of convention over configuration and this is a great example of that. Instead of listing all the files in a separate file, just treat all the files in the directory as being part of the project. Ostensibly the approach is if its in the directory, its part of the project. Simple. Now I’m not an ASP.net developer, far from it, but it did occur to me that the same approach could be applied to the two Visual Studio project types that I am most familiar with, SSIS & SSDT. Like many people I’ve long been irritated by SSIS projects that display a faux file system inside Solution Explorer. As you can see in the screenshot below the project has Miscellaneous and Connection Managers folders but no such folders exist on the file system: This may seem like a minor thing but it means useful Solution Explorer features like Show All Files and Open Folder in Windows Explorer don’t work and quite frankly it makes me feel like a second class citizen in the Microsoft ecosystem. I’m a developer, treat me like one. Don’t try and hide the detail of how a project works under the covers, show it to me. I’m a big boy, I can handle it! Would it not be preferable to simply treat all the .dtsx files in a directory as being part of a project? I think it would, that’s pretty much all the .dtproj file does anyway (that, and present things in a non-alphabetic order – something else that wildly irritates me), so why not just get rid of the .dtproj file? In the case of SSDT the .sqlproj actually does a whole lot more than simply list files because it also states the BuildAction of each file (Build, NotInBuild, Post-Deployment, etc…) but I see no reason why the convention over configuration approach can’t help us there either. Want to know which is the Post-deployment script? Well, its the one called Post-DeploymentScript.sql! Simple! So that’s my new crusade. Let’s kill all the project files (well, the .dtproj & .sqlproj ones anyway). Are you with me? @Jamiet

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• 2011 PASS Board Applicants: Denise McInerney

  - by andyleonard

  Introduction I am interviewing 2011 PASS Board Nominee Applicants. As listed on the PASS Board Elections site the applicants are: Rob Farley Geoff Hiten Adam Jorgensen Denise McInerney Sri Sridharan Kendal Van Dyke I'm asking everyone the same questions and blogging the responses in the order received. Denise McInerney is next up: Interview With Denise McInerney 1. What's your day job? I'm a development DBA at Intuit. Intuit provides financial software and services to small business and consumers....(read more)

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• Merge Join component sorted outputs [SSIS]

  - by jamiet

  One question that I have been asked a few times of late in regard to performance tuning SSIS data flows is this: Why isn’t the Merge Join output sorted (i.e.IsSorted=True)? This is a fair question. After all both of the Merge Join inputs are sorted, hence why wouldn’t the output be sorted as well? Well here’s a little secret, the Merge Join output IS sorted! There’s a caveat though – it is only under certain circumstances and SSIS itself doesn’t do a good job of informing you of it. Let’s take a look at an example. Here we have a dataflow that consumes data from the [AdventureWorks2008].[Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] & [AdventureWorks2008].[Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] tables then joins them using a Merge Join component: Let’s take a look inside the editor of the Merge Join: We are joining on the [SalesOrderId] field (which is what the two inputs just happen to be sorted upon). We are also putting [SalesOrderHeader].[SalesOrderId] into the output. Believe it or not the output from this Merge Join component is sorted (i.e. has IsSorted=True) but unfortunately the Merge Join component does not have an Advanced Editor hence it is hidden away from us. There are a couple of ways to prove to you that is the case; I could open up the package XML inside the .dtsx file and show you the metadata but there is an easier way than that – I can attach a Sort component to the output. Take a look: Notice that the Sort component is attempting to sort on the [SalesOrderId] column. This gives us the following warning: Validation warning. DFT Get raw data: {992B7C9A-35AD-47B9-A0B0-637F7DDF93EB}: The data is already sorted as specified so the transform can be removed. The warning proves that the output from the Merge Join is sorted! It must be noted that the Merge Join output will only have IsSorted=True if at least one of the join columns is included in the output. So there you go, the Merge Join component can indeed produce a sorted output and that’s very useful in order to avoid unnecessary expensive Sort operations downstream. Hope this is useful to someone out there! @Jamiet  P.S. Thank you to Bob Bojanic on the SSIS product team who pointed this out to me!

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #037

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Convert Text to Numbers (Integer) – CAST and CONVERT If table column is VARCHAR and has all the numeric values in it, it can be retrieved as Integer using CAST or CONVERT function. List All Stored Procedure Modified in Last N Days If SQL Server suddenly start behaving in un-expectable behavior and if stored procedure were changed recently, following script can be used to check recently modified stored procedure. If a stored procedure was created but never modified afterwards modified date and create a date for that stored procedure are same. Count Duplicate Records – Rows Validate Field For DATE datatype using function ISDATE() We always checked DATETIME field for incorrect data type. One of the user input date as 30/2/2007. The date was sucessfully inserted in the temp table but while inserting from temp table to final table it crashed with error. We had now task to validate incorrect date value before we insert in final table. Jr. Developer asked me how can he do that? We check for incorrect data type (varchar, int, NULL) but this is incorrect date value. Regular expression works fine with them because of mm/dd/yyyy format. 2008 Find Space Used For Any Particular Table It is very simple to find out the space used by any table in the database. Two Convenient Features Inline Assignment – Inline Operations Here is the script which does both – Inline Assignment and Inline Operation DECLARE @idx INT = 0 SET @idx+=1 SELECT @idx Introduction to SPARSE Columns SPARSE column are better at managing NULL and ZERO values in SQL Server. It does not take any space in database at all. If column is created with SPARSE clause with it and it contains ZERO or NULL it will be take lesser space then regular column (without SPARSE clause). SP_CONFIGURE – Displays or Changes Global Configuration Settings If advanced settings are not enabled at configuration level SQL Server will not let user change the advanced features on server. Authorized user can turn on or turn off advance settings. 2009 Standby Servers and Types of Standby Servers Standby Server is a type of server that can be brought online in a situation when Primary Server goes offline and application needs continuous (high) availability of the server. There is always a need to set up a mechanism where data and objects from primary server are moved to secondary (standby) server. BLOB – Pointer to Image, Image in Database, FILESTREAM Storage When it comes to storing images in database there are two common methods. I had previously blogged about the same subject on my visit to Toronto. With SQL Server 2008, we have a new method of FILESTREAM storage. However, the answer on when to use FILESTREAM and when to use other methods is still vague in community. 2010 Upper Case Shortcut SQL Server Management Studio I select the word and hit CTRL+SHIFT+U and it SSMS immediately changes the case of the selected word. Similar way if one want to convert cases to lower case, another short cut CTRL+SHIFT+L is also available. The Self Join – Inner Join and Outer Join Self Join has always been a noteworthy case. It is interesting to ask questions about self join in a room full of developers. I often ask – if there are three kinds of joins, i.e.- Inner Join, Outer Join and Cross Join; what type of join is Self Join? The usual answer is that it is an Inner Join. However, the reality is very different. Parallelism – Row per Processor – Row per Thread – Thread 0  If you look carefully in the Properties window or XML Plan, there is “Thread 0?. What does this “Thread 0” indicate? Well find out from the blog post. How do I Learn and How do I Teach The blog post has raised three very interesting questions. How do you learn? How do you teach? What are you learning or teaching? Let me try to answer the same. 2011 SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 7 of 31 What are Different Types of Locks? What are Pessimistic Lock and Optimistic Lock? When is the use of UPDATE_STATISTICS command? What is the Difference between a HAVING clause and a WHERE clause? What is Connection Pooling and why it is Used? What are the Properties and Different Types of Sub-Queries? What are the Authentication Modes in SQL Server? How can it be Changed? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 8 of 31 Which Command using Query Analyzer will give you the Version of SQL Server and Operating System? What is an SQL Server Agent? Can a Stored Procedure call itself or a Recursive Stored Procedure? How many levels of SP nesting is possible? What is Log Shipping? Name 3 ways to get an Accurate Count of the Number of Records in a Table? What does it mean to have QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON? What are the Implications of having it OFF? What is the Difference between a Local and a Global Temporary Table? What is the STUFF Function and How Does it Differ from the REPLACE Function? What is PRIMARY KEY? What is UNIQUE KEY Constraint? What is FOREIGN KEY? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 9 of 31 What is CHECK Constraint? What is NOT NULL Constraint? What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL? What is B-Tree? How to get @@ERROR and @@ROWCOUNT at the Same Time? What is a Scheduled Job or What is a Scheduled Task? What are the Advantages of Using Stored Procedures? What is a Table Called, if it has neither Cluster nor Non-cluster Index? What is it Used for? Can SQL Servers Linked to other Servers like Oracle? What is BCP? When is it Used? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 10 of 31 What Command do we Use to Rename a db, a Table and a Column? What are sp_configure Commands and SET Commands? How to Implement One-to-One, One-to-Many and Many-to-Many Relationships while Designing Tables? What is Difference between Commit and Rollback when Used in Transactions? What is an Execution Plan? When would you Use it? How would you View the Execution Plan? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 11 of 31 What is Difference between Table Aliases and Column Aliases? Do they Affect Performance? What is the difference between CHAR and VARCHAR Datatypes? What is the Difference between VARCHAR and VARCHAR(MAX) Datatypes? What is the Difference between VARCHAR and NVARCHAR datatypes? Which are the Important Points to Note when Multilanguage Data is Stored in a Table? How to Optimize Stored Procedure Optimization? What is SQL Injection? How to Protect Against SQL Injection Attack? How to Find Out the List Schema Name and Table Name for the Database? What is CHECKPOINT Process in the SQL Server? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 12 of 31 How does Using a Separate Hard Drive for Several Database Objects Improves Performance Right Away? How to Find the List of Fixed Hard Drive and Free Space on Server? Why can there be only one Clustered Index and not more than one? What is Difference between Line Feed (\n) and Carriage Return (\r)? Is It Possible to have Clustered Index on Separate Drive From Original Table Location? What is a Hint? How to Delete Duplicate Rows? Why the Trigger Fires Multiple Times in Single Login? 2012 CTRL+SHIFT+] Shortcut to Select Code Between Two Parenthesis Shortcut key is CTRL+SHIFT+]. This key can be very useful when dealing with multiple subqueries, CTE or query with multiple parentheses. When exercised this shortcut key it selects T-SQL code between two parentheses. Monday Morning Puzzle – Query Returns Results Sometimes but Not Always I am beginner with SQL Server. I have one query, it sometime returns a result and sometime it does not return me the result. Where should I start looking for a solution and what kind of information I should send to you so you can help me with solving. I have no clue, please guide me. Remove Debug Button in SSMS – SQL in Sixty Seconds #020 – Video Effect of Case Sensitive Collation on Resultset Collation is a very interesting concept but I quite often see it is heavily neglected. I have seen developer and DBA looking for a workaround to fix collation error rather than understanding if the side effect of the workaround. Switch Between Two Parenthesis using Shortcut CTRL+] Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about CTRL+SHIFT+] Shortcut to Select Code Between Two Parenthesis, I received quite a lot of positive feedback from readers. If you are a regular reader of the blog post, you must be aware that I appreciate the learning shared by readers. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Quote of the Day: When You Find that the Ordinary, Isn't

  - by BuckWoody

  The wise man is astonished by anything. - Andre Gide Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Bin packing part 6: Further improvements

  - by Hugo Kornelis

  In part 5 of my series on the bin packing problem, I presented a method that sits somewhere in between the true row-by-row iterative characteristics of the first three parts and the truly set-based approach of the fourth part. I did use iteration, but each pass through the loop would use a set-based statement to process a lot of rows at once. Since that statement is fairly complex, I am sure that a single execution of it is far from cheap – but the algorithm used is efficient enough that the entire...(read more)

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• Undocumented Query Plans: Equality Comparisons

  - by Paul White

  The diagram below shows two data sets, with differences highlighted: To find changed rows using TSQL, we might write a query like this: The logic is clear: join rows from the two sets together on the primary key column, and return rows where a change has occurred in one or more data columns.  Unfortunately, this query only finds one of the expected four rows: The problem, of course, is that our query does not correctly handle NULLs.  The ‘not equal to’ operators <> and != do not evaluate...(read more)

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• PASS By-Law Changes

  - by RickHeiges

  Over the past year, the PASS Board of Directors (BoD) has been looking at changing the by-laws. We've had in-depth in-person discussions about how the by-laws could/should be changed. Here is the link to the documents that I am referring to: http://www.sqlpass.org/Community/PASSBlog/entryid/300/Amendments-to-PASS-Bylaws.aspx One of the changes that I believe addresses more perception than reality is the rule of "No more than two from a single organization". While I personally do not believe that...(read more)

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• How *not* to handle a compensation step on failure in an SSIS package

  - by James Luetkehoelter

  Just stumbed across this where I'm working. Someone created a global error handler for a package that included this SQL step: DELETE FROM Table WHERE DateDiff(MI, ExportedDate, GetDate()) < 5 So if the package runs for longer than 5 minutes and fails, nothing gets cleaned up. Please people, don't do this... Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• CUBEMEMBER and CUBEVALUE stop working after #PowerPivot upgrade to #Excel 2013

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I found an issue upgrading an Excel workbook containing PowerPivot data from Excel 2010 to Excel 2013. All CUBEMEMBER and CUBEVALUE functions point to a cube name that has been changed between the two version – you have to no longer reference the PowerPivot Data name, replacing it with ThisWorkbookDataModel instead. I wrote an article describing the change that you have to manually make to these Excel formulas in this article on SQLBI web site.

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• SCOM, 90 Days In, II. Noise.

  - by merrillaldrich

  Once you get past the basic architecture of a SCOM implementation, and build the servers, and so on, the first real problem is … well, noise. Suddenly (depending on how you deploy) the system will reach out, like marching army ants or a some very clever cybernetic spider and find, and then proceed to yell at you about, every single problem on every server you didn’t know you had. That, of course, is the point. Still, a tool like this is not useful if it doesn’t surface the real problems from the...(read more)

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• Annual SQL Server conference in Poland - SQLDay 2014

  - by Damian

  We had a great 3-days conference this year in Poland. The SQLDay (7th edition) is an annual community conference. We started in 2008 as a part of C2C (community to communities) conference and after that, from 2009 the SQLDay is the independent event dedicated to the SQL Server specialists. This year we had almost 300 people and speakers like Bob Ward, Klaus Aschenbrenner and Alberto Ferrari. Of course there were also many local Polish leaders (MVP's and an MCM :) )If you are curious how we played in Wroclaw this year - just visit the link http://goo.gl/cgNzDl (or try that one https://plus.google.com/photos/100738200012412193487/albums/6010410545898180113?authkey=CITqmqmkrKK8Tw) Visit the conference site: http://conference.plssug.org.pl/ 

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• Displaying Tweets in an ASP.NET UserControl with TweetSharp

  As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I'll be having a little fun over the next few weeks talking about all of the Social Media APIs I've been experimenting with. I thought I would start out today by talking about one of the most popular services, Twitter. Twitter is essentially a microblogging service that allows its users to post messages of up to 140 characters long known as Tweets. Users can subscribe to each other and see tweets from all of their subscriptions in their main feed listings. Due to this ease of providing and receiving updates to and from the masses, Twitter has been adopted by anything from bloggers to celebrities to large corporations. If you have a blog or just a website in general, having a Twitter account alongside it could potentially be a useful way to attract new visitors. Displaying your tweets on your website and ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Join the Authors of SSIS Design Patterns at the PASS Summit 2012!

  - by andyleonard

  My fellow authors and I will be presenting a day-long pre-conference session titled SSIS Design Patterns at the PASS Summit 2012 in Seattle Monday 5 Nov 2012! Register to learn patterns for: Package execution Package logging Loading flat file sources Loading XML sources Loading the cloud Dynamic package generation SSIS Frameworks Data warehouse ETL Data flow performance   Presenting this session: Matt Masson Tim Mitchell Jessica Moss Michelle Ufford Andy Leonard I hope to see you in Seattle!...(read more)

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• SSAS Tabular Workshop online and other upcoming dates (and updates!) #ssas #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  After many conferences and travels, this summer I had some time to write and prepare new sessions for the next wave of conferences. In reality I am just doing that, even if I already restarted traveling for consulting and training. So expect new content about DAX and Tabular coming in the next months! Starting to see real customer adopting Tabular is showing many new challenges and there is still a lot to learn and to create. If you still didn’t started working on Tabular, well, you should. As I always say, as a BI developer you should be able to choose between Tabular and Multidimensional, and in order to do that you should know both of them! One thing that I don’t like very much about marketing is that “Tabular is simpler”, because it’s often translated in “Tabular is for simple projects” when this last statement is not true. Actually, I see a lot of good reasons to adopt Tabular in complex data models, especially in non-traditional scenarios. I know, this is because I love to understand what are the actual limits of a technology, and I’m learning that there is simple a lot of space of improvement also for Tabular. It’s already fast, but it could be faster! How can you start? Well, first of all, by reading our book. Then, by attending to our SSAS Tabular workshop. There is an online edition of the workshop on September 3-4, 2012 (hurry up if you want to register), and there are already several dates planned for the next months (and others will be added soon!). And, of course, by installing SQL Server 2012 and trying to create models over your databases. If you are too lazy, just start with PowerPivot. As soon as you start working with Tabular or PowerPivot, you will see that there is one important skill you need: learning DAX. In the next few days I should publish an article that I’m finishing these days about best practices using SUMMARIZE and ADDCOLUMNS. If only someone published this article one year ago, I would have saved many hours of my life. But, you know, flight manuals are written in blood… and someone has to write! Stay tuned.

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• Purpose

  - by [email protected]

  This blog is just a place for me to gripe and complain about technology in general.

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• .Net Rocks TV - Architecting Windows Phone Applications

  - by psheriff

  I recently completed a .NET Rocks TV show with Carl Franklin. In this episode I discuss some design decisions that will help you create architecturally sound Windows Phone applications. Of course, many of the techniques will also apply to Silverlight and WPF application development as well. Check out the episode at http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=184   Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff   ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1.

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• Extended Events Code Generator v1.001 - A Quick Fix

  - by Adam Machanic

  If you're one of the estimated 3-5 people who've downloaded and are using my XE Code Generator , please note that version 1.000 has a small bug: text data (such as query text) larger than 8000 bytes is truncated. I've fixed this issue and am pleased to present version 1.001, attached to this post. Enjoy, and stay tuned for slightly more interesting enhancements! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

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• Why I don't use SSIS checkpoint files

  - by jamiet

  In a recent discussion in regard to general ETL best practises the subject of checkpoint files as a means for package restartability came up and I stated that I was dead against using them. For anyone that may care, here is why: Configuring them is distinctly unintuitive (that's a matter of opinion but if you follow the link I'll wager that you will agree) they don't make any allowance for loop iterations they cannot store variables of type Object they are limited in ability. There are many scenarios where you may want to execute certain containers regardless of whether the package is started from a checkpoint file but the current usage model does not allow for this. they are ignored by eventhandlers, which wouldn't be so bad if there were a way to toggle this behaviour in certain scenarios they dont work properly I'll expand on the last bullet point. I have encountered situations where the behaviour for tasks executing concurrently is unpredictable. That is, sometimes the completion of a task that executes concurrently with a failed/failing task will make it into the checkpoint file and sometimes it won't. This is near-impossible to reproduce but it does happen as my good friend John Welch will hopefully concur (if he is reading). Is anyone out there making successful use of checkpoint files within SSIS? I would be interested in knowing about that if so. @Jamiet

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• The Dispose Pattern (and FxCop warnings)

  - by Scott Dorman

  [This is actually a response to Bill’s blog post, but since it isn’t possible to leave this as a comment on his blog it’s a post here.] There are many different ways to implement the Dispose pattern correctly. Some are (in my opinion) better than others. In Bill’s blog post he presents a particular pattern, which is an excerpt from his book (Effective C#). The issue centers around the fact that a reader took the code sample presented in the book and ran FxCop (Code Analysis) on it, which generated a warning: “Ensure that base.Dispose() is always called.” The “lesson learned” that Bill presents is that “tools are there to help us, not control us.” While I completely agree with the belief that tools are there to help us, I think it’s important to understand why FxCop is raising this particular warning. The code presented in Bill’s book looks like: // Have its own disposed flag.private bool disposed = false;protected override void Dispose(bool isDisposing){ // Don't dispose more than once. if (disposed) return; if (isDisposing) { // TODO: free managed resources here. } // TODO: free unmanaged resources here. // Let the base class free its resources. // Base class is responsible for calling // GC.SuppressFinalize( ) base.Dispose(isDisposing); // Set derived class disposed flag: disposed = true;} This code does follow all of the guidelines for implementing the Dispose pattern. In this case, it’s presumably part of a larger example showing how to implement the pattern as part of a base class. The reason FxCop is warning you about this code is the first if statement in the Dispose method, which will cause the method to exit if disposed is true. The problem here is that there is the possibility that if the disposed flag is true, the call to base.Dispose() will never be executed. As Bill points out, it is possible for some other code elsewhere in the class to set this flag. He states that this is an “unlikely occurrence.” While that is probably true, it can be a potentially dangerous assumption to make and is one that can be easily corrected. By changing the code slightly you can remove this assumption and correct the FxCop violation. private bool disposed = false;protected override void Dispose(bool disposing){ if (!disposed) { if (disposing) { // Dispose managed resources. } // Dispose unmanaged resources. disposed = true; } base.Dispose(disposing);} Using this implementation allows the call to base.Dispose() to always occur, which ensures that the the disposal chain is always properly followed. Technorati Tags: .NET,C#,Dispose Pattern

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• Buck Woody in Adelaide via LiveMeeting

  - by Rob Farley

  The URL for attendees is https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=ADL1005&role=attend . This meeting is with Buck Woody . If you don’t know who he is, then you ought to find out! He’s a Program Manager at Microsoft on the SQL Server team, and anything else I try to say about him will not do him justice. So it’s great to have him present to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group this week. The talk is on the topic of Data-Tier Applications (new in SQL 2008 R2), and I’m sure it will be a great...(read more)

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• Five things SSIS should drop

  - by jamiet

  There’s a current SQL Server meme going round entitled Five things SQL Server should drop and, whilst no-one tagged me to write anything, I couldn’t resist doing the same for SQL Server Integration Services. So, without further ado, here are five things that I think should be dropped from SSIS.Data source connectionsSeriously, does anyone use these? I know why they’re there. Someone sat in a meeting back in the early part of the last decade and said “Ooo, Reporting Services and Analysis Services have these things called Data Sources. If we used them in Integration Services then we’d have a really cool integration story.” Errr….no.Web Service TaskDitto. If you want to do anything useful against anything but the simplest of SOAP web services steer well clear of this peculiar SSIS additionActiveX Script TaskAnother task that I suspect has never seen the light of day in a SSIS package. It was billed as a way of running upgraded DTS2000 ActiveX scripts in SSIS – sounds good except for one thing. Anytime one of those scripts would try to talk to the DTS object model (which they all do – otherwise what’s the point) then they will error out. This one has always been a real head scratcher.Slow Changing Dimension wizardI suspect I may get some push back on this one but I’m mentioning it anyway. Some people like the SCD wizard; I am not one of those people! Everything that the SCD component does can easily be reproduced using other components and from a performance point of view its much more beneficial to use those alternatives.Multifile Connection ManagerImagining buying a house that came with a set of keys that didn’t open any of the doors. Sounds ridiculous right? How about a SSIS Connection Manager that doesn’t get used by any of the tasks or components. Ah, that’ll be the Multifile Connection Manager then!Comments are of course welcome. Diatribes are assumed :)@Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Conditional formatting of duplicate values in Excel

  - by jamiet

  One of the infrequent pleasures of being a data geek like me is that one does occasionally stumble across little-known yet incredibly useful features in a tool that you use day-in, day-out. Today this happened to me and the feature is Excel’s ability to highlight dupicate rows in a worksheet. Check this out: Notice that I have got some data in my worksheet that contains duplicated values and simply by selecting Conditional Formatting->Highlight Cells Rules->Duplicate Values… Excel will highlight (shown here in red) which rows are duplicated. It seem such a simple thing but when you’re working on a data integration project and the data that is being sent is of, well, let’s say dubious quality features like this are worth their weight in gold. I tweeted about this and it happened to catch a few people’s attention so I figured it might be worth blogging too. Note that I am using Excel 2013 but I happen to know that the feature exists in Excel 2010 and possibly in earlier versions too. Have a great weekend! @Jamiet

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