In the last few days I tested several ways to generate surrogate keys when loading a dimension into a data mart. The classical approach with SQL Server is to rely on a INT IDENTITY column. It works fine, but you don’t know what surrogate key has been  Read more

I already opened a bug and written on newsgroup about this specfic scenario, but I still haven’t received an answer. This morning I met Chris Webb in Munich (I’m attending SQL Pass Europe ) and he told me that one year ago someone of MS told him that  Read more

I just attended the pre-conference of Kimberly Tripp at SQL Pass 2005 Europe . The topic was “New SQL Server 2005 features that a DBA need to learn” and I took advantage of this day to cover an area of SQL2005 I still haven’t explored. One consideration  Read more

I just discovered Reporting Services Scripter , which seems a very useful tool to move Reporting Services objects between different servers. Thanks to Davide Mauri for the link.  Read more

After a few months of beta, SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Service Pack 2 is finally available! As I said in a previous post , there are two SharePoint Web Parts to list and render reports inside a SharePoint site. Really great news.  Read more

Today I’ve got a question from a student (I was teaching a DTS/AS course) that asked me if the use of sp_OAxxx stored procedures to launch a DTS package execution is a good thing (of course, in a production environment). My answer is very simple: never  Read more

Approaching SSIS (Sql Server Integration Services) from a DTS background one of the questions that comes to mind is: what is the better way to populate a fact table? Assuming you have a conventional star schema, you should have a fact table with two kind  Read more

SSIS has a feature I desperately wanted in DTS for years: you can use an external SQL file as a source SQL statement for the SQL Execute Task. Unfortunately this is not available for Data Flow Source component. I tried using variables to load the SQL  Read more

I just read the new SQL Server 2005 Features Comparison . Bad news on the last line: ActiveViews (officially named SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Report Builder , or simply Report Builder) will be delivered only within the SQL Server 2005 Enterprise  Read more

Thanks to Chris Webb I discovered this useful webcast about MDX tips & tricks (rightly named Common MDX mistakes & solutions). It’s available even the whole transcript, so you can read it instead to listen after midnight :-)  Read more