I’ll be giving an SSIS webinar for MSSQLTips.com on Tuesday 15th September 2015. The title is SQL Server Integration Services Best Practices and Tuning Tips and its abstract goes like this: Did you ever inherited a slow running un-maintainable mess of an SSIS package? Or do you want to knock up your SSIS developing skills […]
Report Builder Changes in SQL Server 2016
As a lot of features, Report Builder will improve as well in SQL Server 2016. At the moment of writing CTP 2.3 has been released and Report Builder has the following changes: more up-to date look ‘n feel high dpi in the preview HTML5 support Screenshot of the look ‘n feel: That’s right: away with baby-blue and enter […]
SSIS – Unexpected Termination
I was toying around with the new SQL Server 2016 CTP release and I wanted to run a few SSIS packages to test out the new logging levels. However, everytime I ran a package in the SSIS catalog, it ended with the dreaded “unexpected termination” message. In such a case, nothing is logged to the catalog, so […]
Nominated for Author of the Year 2015
I have the great pleasure to announce that I have been nominated for the “Author of the Year 2015” award at the MSSQLTips website. This means however I have to persuade people to vote for me, hence this blog post I received the award last year, so I have a title to defend! You can vote for […]
SQL 2016 CTP 2.3 has been released
A new monthly release of the SQL Server 2016 preview has been released: CTP 2.3. You can find the download here (the official SQL Server 2016 page currently still links to CTP 2.2). There isn’t any official documentation out yet describing which features have been added or improved, but thanks to Dutch MVP Joost (blog | […]
Reblog: Force installation of 64-bit ACE OLE DB provider
Anyone working with SSIS and Excel probably had the following issue: you are creating an SSIS package using an Excel file in BIDS/SSDT – which is a 32-bit application – and when you try to run the package, it crashes. This is easily fixed by setting the project property Run64BitRuntime to False. The package now […]
Reblog: How I prepared myself for the MCSE certification
SQLKover update: this was one of the most popular posts on my old blog. It’s quite old now and SQL 2014 content has been added to some of the exams. Nonetheless, a lot of it is still valid today. Last week (this is a repost, so not actually last week but over 2 years ago) I […]
Nesting Aggregates with Window Functions
Recenty I was writing an article for MSSQLTips where I had to create a treemap (it will be published soon). As sample data, I used the different folders containing the drafts for all the tips I ever wrote. As measures, I have the number of kilobytes and the number of items per folder. An example: […]
Reblog: Slow source? Make your data flow buffers smaller!
Whoa whoah. Aren’t you supposed to increase your data flow buffer size in order to speed up your packages? If you have enough memory and you can process more rows at the same time because your buffer is larger, that’s what we want, right? Yes, this is confirmed by the old blog post Adjust buffer […]
Scripts and SSDT-BI 2013
Recently I tried to open a script component in SSDT-BI 2013. I was developing for SSIS 2014, so this means using Visual Studio 2013 (I explain in this blog post how I set this up using Visual Studio online). However, I got a message saying there was a compatibility issue with Visual Studio 2012. (this […]