Mar
14
I recently spotted a question about the aggregation task in SSIS, asking if there was an easy way to determine the maximum or minimum value of a group. This had me confused… I distinctly recall having seen these options in the standard aggregate transformation. I quickly setup a dataflow and found exactly that: So, on …
Jul
06
In May this year, I was asked to take over as tech-lead on a project at the company I’m contracted out to. The current tech-lead resigned and decided to move on to greener pastures. What I discovered when I took over the reigns was a little unnerving… The solution is more than 5 years old, …
Jul
05
So, at the company that I’m currently contracted / outsourced to, we’ve decided to setup a guidance forum among a few of the senior developers here, some of them from the company of employ, some of them from external vendors (like myself). The purpose of this forum is to expose us to patterns, practices and …
Mar
26
Something that has always annoyed me when trying to get 100% code coverage when testing a method that throws an expected exception, is that it exits the method before getting to the end of it (obviously). An illustration will aid what I’m talking about… With the above setup, calling repository.GetProjects() throws an InvalidOperationException, as projects …
Nov
18
What is “good” SSIS? What is best practice for SSIS packages? How do I make my SSIS better? These are all questions I hear a lot. The answer is never simple but usually include some mention of naming conventions (I have seen too many packages where tasks, sources, destinations and connections are using default names), …
Oct
21
Around half way through this year, for a couple of reasons, I challenged myself to learn a new programming language or two. Namely, Python and Ruby made it to the top of the list and now I was on the hunt for a good IDE that would assist me while I was getting my Python …