I've started to write a new series called SSIS Stumpers. Each stumper gives
you an intermediate to expert-level business problem to solve with SSIS. Sample
data is provided and you're asked to load the data in a challenging way or
performance tune a package. Each stumper gives you the requirements at first and
you can start there or turn the page to see some hints. If that's not good
enough, you can see a step-by-step instruction on the next page.
The first one in the series, your given an example where you'll need to
unpivot data using canned components in SSIS. You can download this SSIS
Stumper magazine for free with all the data and complete project at
http://www.endtoendtraining.com/private/misc/downloads.aspx. If you'd
like a step-by-step video on how to solve the problem, see my video here:
http://www.jumpstarttv.com/Media.aspx?vid=268
-- Brian Knight
If you haven’t heard yet, CTP 3, which is a public beta of SQL Server 2008 has now been released and can be downloaded at
the Connect website. After a bit of unscientific research, here’s my top 5 BI features in SQL Server 2008. It’s ordered in my priority order. It’s important to note that some of these features have not been introduced in CTP 3 yet but will be coming soon.
- No more IIS requirement for SSRS! – Finally, there’s not the overhead of having to install IIS as part of the popular reporting tool.
- CDC and Merge – While this is a database engine improvement, it will tremendously help your BI effort in SSIS. The ability to do Change Data Capture on a SQL Server table will help warehousing scenarios and reduce your load time by a factor of 9x.
- SSRS scalability – The reporting engine has been significantly improved to scale to million row reports. Also introduced is a best of both worlds table and matrix style report called tablix.
- SSIS thread scheduler improvements – In some early testing, the thread improvements have netted a 20-70% improvement in data flow performance. The main improvement is going to be with a long list of synchronous transforms.
- Authoring Reports in Excel and Word – Thanks to some smart licensing of Soft Artisians’ product suites, you’ll now be able to author a report in Word or Excel. I would expect this to be a pretty big blow to competing reporting platforms since users will be able to write reports in where they spend most their time in.
-- Brian Knight