An Avanade Blogging Community

One of the things we often forget as software developers is that, after we are finished writing our brilliant code, someone will need to actually operate the system we have created. Frankly, no matter how spectacular our code may be, there is no way we can anticipate everything that may change in a system, or the myriad ways other developers and the user community might change requirements or otherwise play with our heads. Read More

The XML data source does not handle complexity within XML very well. For the simplest XML it is fine, but for anything that is complex – in other words, real world data – one needs to resort to Script tasks or executables to actually get to data. Whenever you see “” you can be sure you will have issues with the XML data source. Read More

Should someone at Microsoft come across this little missive, please consider changing the DtsContainer.LoggingOptions property from read only to read/write. Read More

  When creating SSIS packages, one typically just accepts the default values at the time the package is created, then moves on to the “more important stuff”, like the actual code.    One of those default settings is “Delay Validation.”  Read More

One of the most convenient features of SSIS is its ability to create and load flat file sources. In particular, this allows a developer to dump “bad” or non-conforming data into a flat file that can be used to fix data issues at a later date or otherwise log mistakes and cover the technical person’s derriere. Read More

The new CTP preview for SQL 2008 is now available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6a39affa-db6e-48a9-82e4-4efd6705f4a6&DisplayLang=en Read More