Distinct is a partially blocking component that remove duplicates from one flow. Its main advantages against the sort component provided in SSIS are:

• Memory usage: Distinct does not cache the whole flow (as Sort does) but retains in memory only the distincts, consuming less memory then Sort
• Distinct is partially blocking where Sort is fully blocking
• Distinct is freeware, you can easily download sources and adapt it to your needs

Distinct sources can be easily download from the download section at www.sqlbi.eu.

MdxScriptUpdater is a simple C# class that simplifies updating MDX Scripts into a cube in a production environment. MdxScriptUpdater is provided in form of a sample source code as is.

There are a lot of scenarios where nightly batches would update parts of the MDX Script of a cube. For example, I had a customer with a calculated member for each year with data. We can define the calculated member by hand, but we would need to remember to create a new one each year. Another case is the customer that wants to consolidate his own calculated members, without requiring a new cube deployment.

This is the introduction of a paper that describes how to leverage the many-to-many dimension relationships, a feature that debuted available with Analysis Services 2005. After introducing the main concepts, the paper discusses various implementation techniques in the form of design patterns: for each model, there is a description of a business scenario that could benefit from the model, followed by an explanation of its implementation.

Two separate downloads (available on SQLBI.EU project page) contain the full paper in PDF format and SQL Server database and Analysis Services projects with the same sample data used in the paper.

SqlBulkTool is a command line utility that is used to quickly create a mirror of a database. It reads its configuration from an XML file containing source and destination command strings and a list of all the tables to mirror and then handles the work of copying the database in an automated and highly parallelized way.

The parallelism can use the partition capabilities of SQL Server 2005: to handle a huge table it is enough to partition it to make the tool load it by running each single partition in a separate thread, dramatically increasing table load time. In the case where no partitioning is defined the parallelism is handled at the table level.

DtsToSsis-Prepare is a command line tool that prepares a DTS package for a better migration to an SSIS package.

This article describes the needs for this tool and how to use it.

The project is freeware, full source code is available. Please register on www.sqlbi.eu site if you want to receive mail notifications when bug fixes and new releases will be available.