I recently ran across an SSIS package that needed to be rewritten that included the Checksum Transformation from SQLIS.com . The main reason was that they wanted the removal of the component because they were using it to compare rows instead of using something like a Slowly Changing Dimension Transformation

A very common scenario in an ETL process is one in which you need to call out to some configuration tables to figure out some values that it needs to use somewhere downstream in the process. Quite often you also want to pass in some parameters as well. So in

  Jason Strate wrote up an excellent blog post dealing with the people asking for SQL Server to have a TRIM() function in addition to the LTRIM() and RTRIM() function and the possibility of performance issues creeping up.  You can check out his post below: PLEASE, NO TRIM()? Jason

    Sorry for the delay everyone. Looks like my blog had an issue with pre-scheduled postings. Below you can find the links to all of the recordings from our SQL Server 2012 Firestarter Series just in case you missed them. I will be updating the posting here to keep

Thanks to everyone that attended the presentation last night! It was really great to have everyone there and engaged in the conversation. Also great to see some old comrades as well. Below you will find the link to my slides and the content from the presentation. Remember that some of

Well, PTI is ramping up for the release of SQL Server 2012 which is coming out the first half of this year and in order to help get the community up to speed we are putting on TWO MONTHS worth of weekly webcasts based on all of the new goodies

Thanks to everyone that attended the session. It was great getting a lot of good questions. As promised, here are the slides and the scripts for everything. Please make sure to visit http://www.pragmaticworks.com cause they are the ones that provided the opportunity for you to get some

Change Data Capture (CDC) is an awesome feature available in Enterprise Edition of SQL Server 2008. It enables tracking of changes all the way down to the column level and is a really great time saving feature if you are building complex data models that have the need for this

SQL Server has a very solid criteria for replication transactions to the subscribers. First it sends out a batch. If it completes then it goes on to the next one. If not, then it tries each of the transactions in the set individually to see if that corrects the problem.