In my previous blog post I talked about BIML, and how it might revolutionise my approach to creating ETL processes. It’s pretty cool, and very powerful, but there is a bit of a learning curve, so I decided to look for a different way to achieve the same thing, but that required less upskill-time, and preferably […]
I’ve used the BIDS Helper Visual Studio add-on for years now, and I’ve seen and heard of BIML, but it’s one of those things I’ve never needed to look into any further than that. Until I discovered that it’s something that would’ve saved me hours of tedious SSIS work! What is it? BIML (Business Intelligence […]
I’ve recently needed to move data from our transactional database (an Azure SQL database), into an Azure SQL Data Warehouse. A definite case of “harder than it needed to be”… What’s an Azure Data Warehouse? I’ll assume if you’ve read this far, you know what a SQL database is. But an Azure Data Warehouse is […]
Something’s always bugged me when it comes to managing indexes in SQL Server; keeping track of when I created or dropped them. You can already check just about everything you could want to know about indexes, via handy DMV’s. Need to figure out how much your indexes are being used? Take a look at sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats. Or […]
I hadn’t been following the news much regarding SQL Server 2016, so when I did some reading the other day I was quite pleasantly surprised by some of the new features announced (not to mention that it looks like SSMS will finally be getting some much needed love). 🙂 We’ve been having some frustrating intermittent […]
We use Red Gate Cloud Services to backup our Azure database, as well as some storage accounts to Amazon EC2 storage, etc. It all works really well 99% of the time, but after a few failures in a short time period I opened a ticket with Red Gate. The errors we got weren’t always the […]