Month: October 2011

Categories
Featured Syndication

Deploying SSIS Packages with BIxPress

oldbusted-newhotness
Same functionality but obvious differences

If you’ve worked with SSIS for any amount of time, you may quickly come to find that the native way of deploying packages can be…cumbersome. The native tools, while helpful, aren’t exactly the most intuitive to setup or use. This post will show you how you can quickly and easily deploy and configure packages using BIxPress.

Old and Busted

Before I show you how to deploy packages, I should probably quickly explain how to deploy packages in SSIS using native methods. I won’t go into every single detail here on how to deploy packages natively, however, if you’re interested in doing it step-by-step the built-in Help in Business Intelligence Development Studios (BIDS) has a complete walkthrough tutorial for you to check out. To access those tutorials simply press Ctrl+F1 from within BIDS (or click on Help menu and select How Do I from menu). From the ‘How Do I?’ list click on Find Tutorials, Integration Services and then select your tutorial. The one I’m referring to in this post is the Tutorial: Deploying Packages.

The condensed version of the tutorial is this: in order to deploy packages you have to go through a series of steps that aren’t exactly obvious from the interface. First, you have to manually enable the ability to even deploy. You get to this by going to the properties of the project, go to Deployment Utility and set the CreateDeploymentUtility option to True. Once you’re done doing that, you have to build (or rebuild) the project for it to generate what is called a Deployment Manifest file. This file is saved to the file path configured for DeploymentOutputPath where you set the properties for the Deployment Utility. This part alone reeks of user-interface fail to me, but I digress.

Once you’ve created your deployment manifest you’ll need to copy that manifest file out to a share on the target server. After you’ve copied it there, you double click it to launch the Package Installation Wizard. This wizard is pretty typical of Microsoft wizards and is pretty straightforward as far as walking you through your various options. For complete details on deploying using the wizard, refer to the tutorial in the Help. By the time you’re done with the wizard you’ll have deployed the package but your options for customization of deployment are limited.

New Hotness

After learning SSIS over the past year, one of the things that BIxPress has absolutely spoiled me with is the ease of deploying packages. In BIDS just right-click on your package and select Deploy SSIS Package (BIxPress) from the context menu. This will launch the BIxPress Package Deployment wizard. The first screen that comes up gives you a few really cool options such as copying folder structures (if needed), deploy XML files for you if you used XML configurations, you can change the location of those configuration files on your target server, and even change the package level protection from here. These options here have made deployments a breeze for me as on QA servers I had clients putting configs in D:SSISConfigs and on production it was something different like E:SSIS_Configs. Being able to quickly and easily change these options on the fly has saved me tons of headaches.

The next screen is the real meat of this feature. Here you can actually select more than just the one package you right-clicked initially for deployment. Additionally you have lots of options for deploying to and from a server. You can deploy to/from your regular options of File System, SQL Server or SSIS Package Store but here its easily laid out for you for ease. Speaking of ease, ever wanted to deploy in the opposite direction (i.e. production to development)? Simply check off the box ‘Enable 2-way deployment’ and you can quickly deploy bi-directionally quickly and easily. Pretty slick, eh?

Once you check off the packages to deploy and select your deployment destination options, simply click the deploy button in the middle and it quickly deploys your packages. Once it is complete you get a summary of the deployment results which you can save for change management purposes. That’s it, you’re done!

If you want to try out BIxPress you can download a trial copy from the Pragmatic Works website.

Categories
Syndication

We Are Community

Today I was planning on writing a summary post of PASS Summit experience but something happened last night that caused me to change up the queue for blog posts and quite frankly bothered me. Today I’d like to address a few things regarding the Community, behavior within it and just general thoughts about stuff. I apologize ahead of time for the word vomit you’re about to read.

So last night a certain individual began ranting to certain folks on Twitter about how what he thought about the MVP Award and how it seems like they “hand it to anyone now” based on “printing out a card for after hours events”. This person (whom for the time being I’m simply refusing to mention) had an opinion, which is fine. When myself and some others started reading this we began defending whom they were talking about, which in this case was Jen McCown (Blog | Twitter) of MidnightDBA fame. What was funny to me was that this person didn’t seem to want to have a reasonable conversation, they seemed to have an almost personal grudge. Even in email format (yes, some of us tried to reason with him in private as well), he kept up the childish name-calling and outlandish behavior.

Now granted, if you don’t like the MVP program or who is awarded, that’s fine and dandy and you can let the folks at Microsoft know (Blog | Twitter | Facebook). Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but when you put your opinion in a public forum and others challenge you on your statements don’t whine about it and throw a fit. Don’t break down into childish attacks. Don’t start attacking everyone with ridiculously stupid statements and then claim people are attacking YOU. Yes, all of this happened and more last night. Missed the fun? This guy got a new hashtag generated for him aptly named #sqlidiot.

Another interesting point came up during our “conversations” with this guy, namely he made a statement about us whining and we were taking Community vs Real Life. Let’s think about this for a second. The SQL Community is not exactly huge, and if you attended PASS Summit last week you get the sense that it’s more like a global family. Most of us know each other offline and a lot of us have never met but when we do finally meet in person you know each other so well you actually FORGET the fact that you’ve never met! We celebrate our triumphs together. We share our pain together. We pray together. We lift each other up and support each other. Hell, we even officiate each other’s weddings! This is Community. This is Family. To think that our interactions are limited to digital medium is both nearsighted and flat out wrong, it’s only a small part of a very large (and global) picture.

As witnessed last night you can see how protective we are of each other. Noticed I have not made mention of status at all. That’s because something like the MVP award, while cool, doesn’t mean you can’t/don’t belong in this family. From the person looking to start writing their first SQL query, to the professional speakers, to the folks writing the engine for the products we all know and love we are all One. Yeah, sounds a little over the top existential but I truly feel that way about this Community. When someone goes on a public forum and starts tearing others down, for no apparent reason whatsoever, don’t be shocked when you have quite a few folks fighting back. You may be brave behind a keyboard but I’d love for someone to try that nonsense at a SQLSaturday event or PASS Summit. It’s not Community vs Real Life, Community IS Real Life and I will defend it, and the people that make it up, until the very end.

Finally there’s general conduct. We’re all entitled to our own opinions but how you express those opinions, especially in a public forum like Twitter, is critical. I can have a conversation with someone and not see eye to eye with them, that’s fine. Resorting to childish name-calling and tired/pathetic ‘your mother’ comebacks just makes you look like an absolute idiot and you lose any and all credibility you may have had to start with. Some people tend to forget the acronym PASS stands for the Professional Association for SQL Server, emphasis on professional. While we do tend to have our after hours and colorful fun, you’ll rarely see someone all-out break that professional decorum. That’s a matter of respect, for both yourself and the people you interact with. Think about the consequences of your actions, ESPECIALLY in a public forum. The Internet, as they say, is forever (and Google Bing Bingle has a long and easily searchable memory).

I know some of you followed along closely last night and even chimed in with this guy, some of you lurked, some are probably hearing about this for the first time. What are your thoughts?

Categories
Syndication

PASS Summit Keynote Day 1 Highlights

CLOUD! BIG DATA! EXCEL! CLOUD! CLOUD! Okay, recap done. Not really…sort of. In all honesty, while delivered in a fairly terrible fashion, there were some pretty big announcements made in today’s keynote. First let’s start with the one a lot of folks have been waiting on….

Official Names Revealed

The release of SQL Server we’ve known as “Denali” for the last 12 months now has an official name: SQL Server 2012! I know, not exactly exciting but at least it’s nice to have an official name. Also, since according to Mayan calendar the world ends this year anyways, this is THE LAST VERSION OF SQL SERVER YOU’LL EVER NEED!!! In addition to Denali SQL Server 2012 getting a name, we also got the official name for project “Crescent”, which is now officially known as PowerView.

 

BIG Data on Windows/Azure

Those worried about the NoSQL movement and how Microsoft would play in that space? No more worrying, now you get best of both worlds with the announcement of Microsoft’s support for Hadoop on Windows and Windows Azure! This is actually pretty exciting even though, in this blogger’s humble opinion, this kind of scale doesn’t matter for 99% of the folks out there. With this announcement, however, Microsoft has made huge strides in make the Cloud more relevant for big businesses. Want a multi-terrabyte system that scales? Windows Azure can handle that for you now. Want to handle that internally? Local options also supported. Or create a hybrid solution, the possibilities are actually fairly cool here.

The other story that was sold is that you can use Microsoft BI stack against your data in Hadoop. An example of this was shown by using PowerPivot to connect to Hadoop on Windows via the new ODBC connector. This connector will be available sometime in November as a CTP download. Speaking of connectors, Microsoft recently released connectors for PDW as well so you can connect big data with big iron for those who need that kind of data firepower.

 

Project “Data Explorer”

They also showed off a new tool which allows you to explore and merge data from Azure marketplace and various data sources. They spent a good chunk of time demoing bringing together data from Azure Marketplace, SQL Server and some other sources. Honestly I started tuning out a bit at this point since the #sqlpass stream became “interesting” at that point.

 

The rest of the keynote consisted of a rather downplayed series of demoes in Excel/PowerPivot/Power View. If you’d like you can check out the keynotes yourself here.

Categories
Policy Based Management Syndication

Expiring Databases and Policy-Based Management

Today on Twitter my friend Jes “Run Forrest Run” Schultz Borland (Blog | Twitter) asked the Community “How do you clean up your dev environments? Let DBs sit out there forever? Delete after X months? Other? This seemed like an interesting issue to tackle and me being the PBM freak that I am, immediately I had a light bulb moment for a policy. In this post I’ll show you a policy you can run against your databases (can work in dev or whatever environment suits you) and will tell you which databases are older than 30 days old. As an added bonus, I’ll also show you how to add a custom extended property to set a custom expiration date.

Continue reading “Expiring Databases and Policy-Based Management”