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Of late one may have noticed that I have become very interested in high-brow, generally vaporous, disciplines such as RESTful data services, data interoperability and cloud computing whilst coincident with that has been the inexorable rise of the term “mashup” in the information technology lexicon. “Mashup” means different things to different ...

[If you’re using SSIS to pull data out of Oracle then this may be of interest to you.] In SQL Server 2008 Microsoft introduced a feature called Change Data Capture (CDC) which basically enables you to query a SQL Server table from within SSIS and ask for all rows that have been created or changed since a given point-in-time. Attunity have now ...

I’ve noticed some confusion in the community over the mythical “4000 character limit” in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and thought it may be worth clarifying the situation. The most common misconception I hear is “A SSIS string variable has a maximum length of 4000 characters”. This isn’t true and its easy to prove; simply create a ...

Applications hosted on Windows Azure will create log files and given that we don’t have access to the running app instances the log files are the only means available to us for debugging and problem resolution so they’re a very important part of the whole service. Recently I wanted to take a look at the log files for my Tweetpoll Azure application ...

I have noticed a few fellow SQL bloggers over on SQLBlog.com (most notably Aaron Bertrand) have started to use their blog to draw attention to various submissions to Microsoft Connect that they believe to be worthy of attention. I think this a great idea, the more attention that are paid to Connect items the better hence I’m going to start calling ...

I’ve just received my session feedback for my SSIS Nuggets Live session at SQLBits 4 which happened 7 days ago. I’m quite pleased with the marks I received but moreover I had some great written feedback as well, some of which I’ll take the opportunity to address here: “Many presenters appear to have issues with connecting laptops to ...

I made my presenting debut yesterday at the SQL Bits 4 conference in Manchester (Europe’s largest ever SQL Server community event and its FREE) where I presented my "SSIS Nuggets Live” session. I had a few technical issues to begin with that meant I started a little late but thankfully they were only teething troubles and I managed to get ...

Attunity, the company that makes Microsoft’s SSIS connectors for Oracle and Teradata (read more about those at Connecting to Oracle just got a whole lot better), have released (in beta) a new product called Attunity Oracle-CDC for SSIS. CDC stands for change-data-capture which is a method of easing the retrieval of new or updated data from a ...

Recently I was using Visual Studio 2005’s “Create Schema” feature to generate an XML Schema Document (XSD) from an XML file However I began to run into trouble with larger documents for which Visual Studio was throwing me back the following error:   That is when my colleague David Portas reminded me that Business Intelligence Development ...

Of late I have been fiddling with Powershell quite a bit as I toil with SDS Shell. The simplicity with which one can build seemingly complex logic using Powershell really appeals to me and, inevitably, I have started to think about Powershell as a lightweight data integration tool. Certainly there are plenty of comparisons with the data ...