Do you know there are hundreds of additional tasks, tools, and components for SSIS, many which are free? Why re-invent the wheel? Take a look at this exhaustive list created by Todd McDermid on CodePlex: SSIS Community Tasks and Components. It … Continue reading →
SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) has a number of enhancements in SQL Server 2012: Improved web user interface – If you are a current user of MDS in SQL Server 2008 R2 you know that it’s pretty difficult to … Continue reading →
SQL Server 2012 has many new security features, and three of the bigger new features are: Default Schema for Windows Groups, Audit enhancements, and User-Defined Server Roles. Default Schema for Windows Groups A database schema can now be tied to a … Continue reading →
AlwaysOn is a new integrated high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solution that provides redundancy within a datacenter and across datacenters to help enable fast application failover during planned and unplanned downtime. Specifically, AlwaysOn delivers failover cluster instances, multiple secondaries, active … Continue reading →
Junk dimensions are dimensions that contain miscellaneous data such as flags and indicators. When designing a data warehouse, you might come across a source system that has a bunch of yes/no indicator fields. If those fields needs to be tracked … Continue reading →
A factless fact table is a fact table that does not have any measures. It is essentially an intersection of dimensions (it contains nothing but dimensional keys). There are two types of factless tables: One is for capturing an event, … Continue reading →
There is an excellent site called TechNet Virtual Labs that enables you to quickly and easily evaluate Microsoft’s newest products and technologies via hands-on labs in which you are guided through the lab in about 90 minutes. There is nothing to … Continue reading →
These are my favorite SSAS white papers released by Microsoft, with many from SQLCAT. I’ll keep this post updated with new versions of the white papers as well as new ones that come along that I find useful: Analysis Services 2008 … Continue reading →
A table that does not have a clustered index is referred to as a Heap. While a lot has been written about index fragmentation and how to defrag indexes, there is not much that talks about how to defrag a … Continue reading →
If you are using Visio 2010 and creating tables via the Database Model Diagram template, you may be surprised to learn there is not a way to build CREATE TABLE scripts from your resulting diagram. The last release that supported … Continue reading →
The SQL Server 2012 Developer Training Kit has been updated with a bunch of new content (download it here via the web installer). New and updated content will be released periodically and can be downloaded on-demand using the Web Installer. This … Continue reading →
Microsoft has posted the licensing for SQL Server 2012. It has simplified licensing: SQL Server 2012 will offer two licensing options – one that is based on computing power (“core based”), and one that is based on users or devices (“Server + … Continue reading →