Thanks to Alberto Ferrari there is a new way to handle Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD) with Integration Services: he just released Table Difference 1.1 and FlowSync 1.0 . Both are downloadable at www.sqlbi.eu . The problem that those components solve  Read more

TableDifference has been updated to version 1.1. The major improvement is the fact that now TableDifference can handle a field as Key : a field that represent a key in the table, you must supply KeyOrder Compare : a field that is to be compared between  Read more

Several people downloaded TableDifference to handle SCD faster, some of them, especially using it on huge table (more than 10 millions rows) noticed memory problems. The problem is that of a flow running too fast and making TableDifference cache data,  Read more

I wrote a small tool to improve the migration from SSIS to DTS. The problem I had to solve was this: I have many Data Transform Tasks that have a simple behavior, read data from a query and write data on a table, using fast load with batch insert. You  Read more

I had the opportunity to test TableDifference (a component written by Alberto Ferrari ) since early versions and I can say it is a very interesting way to handle Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) much faster than with the standard SCD component of SSIS.  Read more

In SSIS the SCD component does a lot of work for you but it works so slowly that it is quite always convenient to create an “ad hoc” solution to handle the slowly changing dimensions. As the main problem is that of determining the difference between the  Read more

After I installed build 2153 , my SQL Server Managment Studio DTS 2000 Package Designer (which is part of SQL Server 2005 Feature Pack ) was not working. After I searched for an updated feature pack (which has not been released) I discovered that the  Read more

I have being a user of PromptSQL since version 1.0. This utility was acquired by Red-Gate some months ago and today they shipped the version 2.0, renamed ad SQL Prompt 2.0 . SQL Prompt is fundamentally the ability to add Intellisense when you are editing  Read more

I just had to profile MDX queries sent to SSAS from some client. Office Web Components (that are used in the cube browser of Management Studio) in many circumstances send a lot of MDX queries, increasing roundtrip between client and server, resulting  Read more

If you have trouble installing SQL Server 2005 SP1 and you found in the log that views sys.dm_exec_query_resource_semaphores and sys.dm_exec_query_memory_grants are missing, then you have to move the Resource database into the same path of master database.  Read more