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News just in… Microsoft have purchased Zoomix, a data quality software vendor. From the press release: Zoomix will contribute a critical layer of data improvement to Microsoft's SQL Server Data Platform Interesting stuff. One would think this will sit fairly and squarely within SSIS given that SSIS will be shipping Data Profiling ...

I recently got accepted onto the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) beta program and have been getting to grips with the how, what and why of the service. For those that don't know SSDS is a cloud computing platform from Microsoft that allows us to store data in the cloud rather than host it on our own database servers. The data is ...

My learned colleague Howard van Rooijen recently blogged about the new release of Microsoft Source Analysis for C#  (aka StyleCop) and his enthusiasm for the tool was near-tangible. This tool analyses your source code and suggests changes that may be in line with best practice coding skills and the ultimate aim is for a consistent ...

Quick note. Doug Laudenschlager (I've checked and rechecked the spelling - I think that's right :) from the SSIS team has begun a SSIS related blog at Dougbert.com (RSS feed). Doug is the technical writer on the team which means that he writes all the SSIS documentation in SQL Server Books Online. Hence, what Doug doesn't know about SSIS really ...

SQL Server 2008 is introducing some interesting querying and storage enhancements such as the introduction of spatial data and the FILESTREAM attribute on VARBINARY(MAX) columns and my thoughts have recently turned to what querying enhancements we are going to see in future versions. I was chatting to Rob Farley recently and we started to wonder ...

In the past I have advocated (and still do advocate) the use of a user variable in SSIS packages to store the path to a folder on the hard drive; I always use a variable called @[User::RootFolder] for this. Having this path available within a package variable enables you to dynamically set the location of files that your package may reference ...

I listen to a lot of podcast series these days (a great way of filling up my one hour train commute) and I've recently subscribed to Perspectives with Jon Udell. This morning I listened to his latest one Where is WinFS now? which featured an interview with Quentin Clark from the SQL Server team. Quentin was prominent on the supposedly ill-fated ...

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) and Live Mesh are the two technologies that are uppermost in my mind at the moment. [My thoughts on SSDS are here and on Live Mesh here.] Hence then it didn't take me long to start wondering about the value of the two of them being integrated together. SSDS is a data storage platform and Live Mesh is a data ...

From Amazon SimpleDB documentation: Eventual Consistency Amazon SimpleDB keeps multiple copies of each domain. When data is written or updated [...] and Success is returned, all copies of the data are updated. However, it takes time for the update to propagate to all storage locations. The data will eventually be consistent, ...

Have you noticed yet that I'm getting excited about SSDS? More information is trickling out about SSDS day by day. Yesterday there was a presentation on SSDS at MIX08 by Nigel Ellis which was more in-depth than anything I'd seen or heard before because it talks about the underlying architecture that will be supporting this. Take this typical ...