Archive for March, 2007

VS Live In San Francisco

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

I will be at VS Live in San Francisco next week focusing on the Team System and SQL Server 2005 tracks. I’m most interested in getting ideas & hearing about others’ experiences with automated testing of SSIS ETL packages. If you’ll be there and are interested in such discussions, I’d be happy to meet up and talk further– just drop me a line in the comments or via email: tito/at/titoperez/dot/com. SSIS and (especially) VSTS are relatively new to me, and I’m part a nascent BI/DW project using both.

Of course, I’m still open to ideas from those who won’t be there, too.

Posted in Events, Microsoft, SQL Server, SSIS, Testing, VS Team System | No Comments »

Terms of Use/Privacy

Monday, March 19th, 2007

I read about GotVoice from this positive review on techcrunch, and thought I’d consider giving their service a go. Before signing up, I wanted to read their Terms of Use [PDF here]– specifically any thing related to privacty, etc… Initially I was glad to see on the first page front and center the section headed “PRIVACY AND PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION”.

This enthusiasm was quickly tempered by the instruction “See the Privacy Statement below for disclosures relating to the collection and use of your personal information.” Ok, no big deal. I used Acrobat Reader’s find(”Privacy Statement” to get to:

FOR INFORMATION REGARDING THE GOTVOICE .COM PRIVACY STATEMENT CLICK HERE.

I’ll call this the “Oakland Link” because, unfortunately, there was no “here” HERE. Of course, I tried clicking on “HERE” to no avail. There were other hyperlinks throughout the rest of the PDF. Needless to say, I won’t be signing up with GotVoice, at least until I can actually find their mythical “Privacy Statement”

Posted in Privacy | No Comments »

roundup

Monday, March 19th, 2007

Joy Mundy webcast: Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services to Populate a Kimball Method Data Warehouse

Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server, Part I

On the heels of the release of Service Pack 2 for MSSQL Server 2005 comes what will, perhaps, be the most warmly received Reporting Services “report pack” to date, the Performance Dashboard for Microsoft SQL Server (“Performance Dashboard Reports”). The Performance Dashboard Reports are a set of custom report files designed to be run from within SQL Server Management Studio.

Top 100 Most Influential People in IT
webcast: Designing A Data Warehouse: Part 1 Dimension Type briefly covers different dimension change typs (SCD Types 0,1,2,3) and inferred members
What makes an enterprise wiki?
Build Date Generators and Manipulate Date and Time Data in SQL

patterns & practices Visual Studio Team System: “insightful and practical guidance around using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System”

Posted in Data Warehouse, Database, Reporting Services, SQL Server, SSIS, VS Team System | No Comments »

roundup

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Using SQL Server Files for Unit Testing in VS2005 TS

One of the nice features of VSTS is data-driven testing. It’s as easy as hooking up a couple of attributes to the test classes, which then allows tests to be run for multiple sets of input data. The problem is when you want to include data with the test project.

(a solution follows)

Using capistrano to manage EC2 instances (amazon.com’s “virtual computing environment”). The comments also have some interesting discussion about the considerations made in choosing to use Amazon’s services for a startup. See also: Building a Web Application with Ruby on Rails and Amazon S3.
Dare Obasanjo pondering the future of Amazon’s S3 & EC2 services:

What I suspect is that without some catalyst (e.g. the next YouTube is built on S3 + EC2)these services will not reach their full potential. This would be unfortunate because I think in much the same way we moved from everyone rolling their own software to shrinkwrapped software, we will need to move to shrinkwrapped Web platforms in the future instead of everyone running their own ad-hoc cluster of Windows or LAMP servers and solving the same problems that others have solved thousands of times already.

Posted in Database, Ruby on Rails, SQL Server, Testing, Tools | No Comments »

My first RoR project: Freevite

Monday, March 12th, 2007

The “real world” project I’ve come up with to learn Ruby on Rails will be ‘Freevite’ - an online event coordination application. A quick google turned up this project announcement (using perl no less), but it doesn’t appear anything became of it. I expect to make a lot of mistakes on the way, but I expect this to be an application I will use and therefore (hopefully) improve.

The design should be straightforward enough in its first incarnation, and I expect most of my initial learning will be finding the best way for me to develop the application on a hosted server account. The first (only) RoR tuturial I walked through, I did using vi over a SSH terminal. I expect that will get real old, real fast.

Next Step: Find development & deployment tool(s)

Posted in Freevite, Projects, Ruby on Rails | 4 Comments »

Passing Variables Between Packages

Monday, March 12th, 2007

I recently came across a roadblock in an SSIS project — how to pass the variables scoped in one package to a “child” package executed via an “Execute Package Task”. Like most SSIS speedbumps, the solution was easy to implement once I found the answer (at SQLIS.com) — Package Configurations.

On the menu bar: SSIS >> Package Configuration ….

From the Configuration Type dialog, select “Parent package variable” and go through the wizard to map the Parent package variable to the variable in this Child package

Parent Package Variables

Posted in How To, SSIS, Tools | No Comments »

roundup

Friday, March 9th, 2007

32 bit memory limitations explained at Coding Horror: Dude, Where’s My 4 Gigabytes of RAM? The takeaway: don’t buy more than 3GB of RAM if you plan on using a 32 bit OS for the next few years.

Adobe goes Agile with Photoshop

Deprecated Features in SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

Posted in Agile, Operating Systems, SSIS | No Comments »