This past week I ran into an issue where I needed to use a .dbf destination in my SSIS package. All was going well; I set up the destination and pressed the preview button to make sure everything was great, and BOOM! Blew up in my face. Not cool. So if you happen to be having issues setting up a connection for a .DBF here is what you need to do. Use the Native OLE DBMicrosoft Jet 4.0 OLE DB...
January 17, 2010
Why Won't My .dbf Destination Work
17January
December 21, 2009
Prepare To Install Reporting Services
21December
The first step in setting up a report server is getting Reporting Services installed. There are a few differences between the process for 2005 and 2008. On the installation side, if you do not have the IIS setting configured before running the SQL install process you will not even be given the option to install reporting services in 2005. You still have the option even without setting up IIS...
December 18, 2009
Control Flow vs Data Flow
18December
After my first day of SSIS training my boss walked into the office and said to me, “how was the first day of class”. To which I responded, “great!” Then asked me, “so what is the difference between the control flow and data flow?” This posed a simple, but foundational concept, of SSIS. There are a few key things to remember when talking about the...
December 16, 2009
Show All Projects in the Solution Explorer
16December
If your like me, then you may have a little OCD and need everything to be completely organized in your environment. BIDS has been annoying me in this respect lately. I am working on creating a data warehouse and will be starting on the next portion of the project shortly. I wanted to keep everything for it in the same solution, my warehouse ETL as well as the work on the Cube. So I figure...
December 8, 2009
SQL Maintenance Plan Doesn't Delete Backups
08December
I recently created a maintenance plan for our server to backup all the databases on a daily basis. In the cleanup step I set it to delete backups older than 7 day. I let the plan run for a week and checked on it to make sure the old backups were being deleted. This would be kind of a useless post if everything was working correctly, so as you guessed, they were not being deleted. I check...
December 4, 2009
SQL UPDATE Using a Join
04December
You may need to do an update on joined tables to get a more conditional update. For instance, I have a Student table as well as an AcademicStatus table. The Student table contains all the students (profound, I know) and the AcademicStatus table tells if a student is in good standing, at risk, or has dropped out based on a StandingID. The Student table also lists a graduation date and a current...
November 20, 2009
Trouble Viewing Reports in Report Server
20November
Have you ever opened your report server only to find a blank section of nothing-ness where your reports should be? The solution to your problem is more than likely in the permissions. The easiest fix for this situation is to right click on IE and select Run As Administrator. There are, however, ways around having to run IE as an administrator each time you want to view reports. If disabling...
November 18, 2009
Saving Changes Is Not Permitted
18November
Have you ever created a table thinking everything looked amazing and was designed perfect only to come back and need to add to it? Maybe you need to change a data type, add a column, delete a column or move a column. It’s an easy fix, right. Just right click on the table, go to Design mode and make your changes. Well, this would be a pretty useless story if all that worked flawlessly. As...
November 18, 2009
Database Design
Designing a database can be a daunting task, especially on a large scale. There are several ways inside of SQL Server Management Studio to do design. You could create your database and right click on the ‘Tables’ node and enter all the information there. Column names are listed out followed by their data types with all the properties being set below. This is a quick and easy way to edit your...
