March 6th, 2012 
I just received a new Dell Precision M4600 from work. I wanted to install Windows on a SSD so that it would fly. I know that if you are configuring the m4600 on the Dell website, you are given the option to add a 2nd 128GB (SATA3) Mobility Solid State Drive for just $480.00. Since [...]
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Add SSD to Dell Precision
Posted in General 
Tags: Dell Precision, Hard Drive, mSATA, Precision M4600, Solid State Disk, SSD 
No Comments »SQL 2012 RC0
Microsoft has release SQL Server 2012 RC0. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28145 You can also get the RC0 release of PowerPivot for Excel 2010. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28150
Table Size History
When maintaining a data warehouse, it is import understand the size and disk requirements of your tables over time. My current client has asked that I generate a report showing table disk usage over time, so that we can predict table growth. I was looking around and found the procedure sp_spaceused. This returns the row [...]
Posted in SQL Tags: Dimesion, Disk Usage, Fact, sp_spaceused, SQL, SQL 2008, SQLServer, SQLServerPedia Syndication, SSIS, SSRS, T-SQL, Table No Comments »SSIS Logging and Auditing Framework
Thank you for all of you that came out to my presentation at the Atlanta Microsoft BI user group, last Monday. We had a pretty good turn out, 40+. The slide deck can be found on the user group web site. http://atlantabi.sqlpass.org/Resources.aspx Here are the links to the other posts that I referred to during [...]
Table Auditing with XML
When working with meta data tables it can be very useful to track when people make changes to the data. How do you track any change against any number of columns for any table? I have implemented a fairly simple solution that uses triggers and stores all changes as XML into one change log table. [...]
Presenting @ Atlanta Microsoft BI user group
I will be presenting at the next Atlanta Microsoft BI user group. Monday, July 25th, 2011. http://atlantabi.sqlpass.org/ Topic: SSIS Logging and Auditing Framework Level: Beginer / Intermediate Meeting Place Matrix Resources 115 Perimeter Center Place Suite 250 (South Terraces Building) Atlanta, GA 30346 Overview: Proper logging in your SSIS packages can help save hours in [...]
Avoiding dups when querying sysssislog
Last year I blogged about Avoiding dups in Parent Packages, when using custom logging. Todd McDermind has a good post on how to query the sysssislog table, if you are using the built in SQL SSIS logging. http://toddmcdermid.blogspot.com/2011/04/transforming-ssis-sysssislog-entries.html
Parse XML in SSIS
One of the built in data sources in in SSIS is an XML document. I started writing a package to pull data from XML stored in a SQL table. I noticed that there were several little gotchas that I had to work around to get the data the way I wanted. The XML file can [...]
Posted in SQLServerPedia Syndication, SSIS Tags: Microsoft, SQL, SQL 2008, SQLServerPedia Syndication, SSIS, XML, XML Source No Comments »Looping through files on an FTP server
I have always know that that SSIS has an FTP control Flow task, but I have never tried to use. Turn out that the task is fairly limited and can be a pain to work with. I am attempting to get a list of all files, in a folder, on an FTP server. The FTP [...]
Posted in SQLServerPedia Syndication, SSIS Tags: FTP, Microsoft, SQL, SQL 2008, SQLServerPedia Syndication, SSIS 1 Comment »Step By Step PowerPivot using Excel Data
This post is a step by step beginner’s guide to PowerPivot. I will show the basics of creating a PowerPivot workbook using Excel data. PowerPivot has dramatically improved the way in which we can analyze our data in Excel. Using PowerPivot in an Excel PivotChart provides the added benefit of Slicers. Slicers are a cool new [...]
Posted in PowerPivot Tags: Business Intelligence, Excel, Excel 2010, Microsoft, Office 2010, Power Pivot, PowerPivot, Slicer No Comments »