James works at Microsoft as a big data and data warehousing solution architect where he has been for most of the last nine years. Before that he was an independent consultant working as a Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence architect and developer. He is a prior SQL Server MVP with over 35 years of IT experience. Check out his book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh.
I get 15-30 calls/emails a week from recruiters (not counting the dozens of auto-generated emails I get). Being a contractor I’m always trying to build relationships with recruiters so when my contract nears an end, I have plenty of job … Continue reading →
If you are interested in viewing the recorded sessions for the PASS Summit 2011, you can order the DVD. You can purchase the Regular Summit Sessions as well as the Pre-Conference Sessions. However, if you are interested in the sessions … Continue reading →
There are some FANTASTIC videos of the sessions from SQLInspire New York 2011. I highly recommend that you check out all the videos, as I found some great career tips in all of them. As the site says “We’ve lined up … Continue reading →
In previous SSIS versions as the developer you were responsible for configuring all of your logging options, such as what events you were going to log, which containers you were going to collect logs for, and where you were going … Continue reading →
I have been fortunate the past few months to be working on a HP ProLiant DL980 G7 Server. This is one killer server: 8 processors, 80 cores, 160 virtual processors, and 2 TB’s of memory. Oh, and there are two … Continue reading →
Since I work mostly from home, video/voice conferencing and IM are of major importance to me, and using the right tools is vital to keeping me productive. The tools used for conferencing should have IM, presence indicator, voice and video … Continue reading →
Thanks for everyone who attended my presentation “How To Make a LOT More Money as a Consultant” at HASSUG. Here is the PowerPoint presentation: How To Make a LOT More Money as a Consultant How to make a LOT more money … Continue reading →
When building a data warehouse, it is important that primary keys of dimension tables remain stable. To accomplish this, it is strongly recommended that surrogate keys be created and used for primary keys for all dimension tables instead of using … Continue reading →
If you’ve been working with databases for any length of time, you have heard the term normalization. Normalization is the process of efficiently organizing data in a database. There are two goals of the normalization process: eliminating redundant data (for … Continue reading →
ETL is the most common method used when transferring data from a source system to a data warehouse. But there are cases where you might want to use ELT. What is the difference between the two? Read on: Extract, Transform, … Continue reading →
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 →