A journey through database heaven & hell (and other stuff)
Archive for the ‘Business Intelligence’ Category.
Live from the conference call
Just 20 months after the release of SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2 (“Gemini”/”Kilimanjaro”) is today released to manufacturing…
The conference call featured Ted Kummert and Tom Casey of Microsoft.
Parallel Data Warehouse (project “Madison”) will be released later in the year.
The 6.3 Desktop Professional install will in some cases loop on the Microsoft Windows Installer 3.1 v2 and Microsoft XML 6.0, which are prerequisites for the install, when attempting to install on Windows 7. You get a continuous loop with the message
One or more of the installations required a reboot. Would you like to reboot now?
No matter how many times you reboot, it does not want to install.
The trick is to run the setup.exe program from the following installation location
Proclarity 6.3 setup.exe location
Scenario: Your SSIS package fails and you see error messages in your log files along the lines of
Description: Failed to retrieve long data for column “xxxxx”.
End Error Error: 2010-03-03 16:30:02.84 Code: 0xC020901C Source: Data Flow Task 1 Source – Query [1]
Description: There was an error with output “OLE DB Source Output” (11) on component “Source – Query” (1).
The column status returned was: “DBSTATUS_UNAVAILABLE“.
You will probably find that the column “xxxxx” is something like a text or picture data type (i.e. BLOB or similar) and what’s happening is that SQL Server is either running out of Disk Space to store this stuff.
Step one is obviously to check if you actually need all this data and optimise your dataflow by removing any unnecessary columns.
If you can’t do that, try setting the BLOBTempStoragePath and BufferTempStoragePath to Fast Drives, or at least drives with more disk space.
See these posts for more details
http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/346675/ssis-runs-out-of-temp-file-names
Well, I finally got around to taking a look at R2 and specifically Master Data Services (due mostly to some strange decisions on my current data migration project).
First impressions – I actually quite like it. I can see that it is going to require some deep late-night learning to completely get my head around it all but it’s certainly not what I would call a Version 1 product (actually given that it’s born out of Stratature +EDM it’s more like version 4/5) . The new web based UI is pretty clunky though and for sure left me a little frustrated at times. However mosts of my other issues primarily centred around “de-nannying” Windows Server 2008 R2… all I can say (from a guy who likes to be fairly agile) is AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHH!
So here was the set up.
Virtual Server
SQL Server
Some things I needed to do for later on but may as well have done here
After the SQL Install, you need to run the MDS install from the SQL Install Media.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I will point you to the msdn installation area and two excellent posts to get installed, web app configured (this took me a couple of attempts until I found Sutha’s article) and run in some test data to see how it works.
Baby Steps (Nick Barclay’s 7 step tutorials)
And the result was this
first hierarchy
One last useful link – when you are importing data, there are a set of error codes applied to the datasets (nice touch). The problem is that they are not documented anywhere (crap touch…attention to detail!!). The result, I spent a couple of hours looking for ERR210000 and what I might have done wrong only to find from Kirk’s helpful list that ERR210000 means “all is well” (great “ERR” can now mean “OK”)
Have a play…
A new Business Intelligence developer community/network is just about to be launched by Brian Knight and the people at Pragmatic Works
Writing for BIDN
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Looks as if this could be an excellent BI resource in the making
It’s available today for Technet & MSDN subscribers…
SQL Server 2008 R2 is the next generation of the Microsoft SQL Server database platform, planned for release in the first half of calendar year 2010. MSDN and TechNet Subscribers can download the SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP today. Non-subscribers will be able to download the November CTP later this month. The R2 release brings significant new capabilities and enhancements that can help your business keep pace with today’s growing and changing data management needs. Increase productivity and reduce data management costs by taking advantage of an even more scalable platform with comprehensive database and application management tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 helps users to build rich analysis and reports and helps organizations improve the quality of their data. Find out more, download the Community Technology Preview pre-release and let us know what you think. Also, join the SQL Server communities around the world and the SQL Server development team in the conversation.
Here’s a link to a useful article by Kristen Hodges about using the new 2008 MERGE SQL construct to carry out Type 1 & Type 2 Dimension updates
Based on our experience, this is certainly worth a look over the old SCD component – we have seen some major performance improvements using MERGE over the SCD components (and other workarounds that we had previously used).
I'm a Business Intelligence Architect/Developer. I spend my working life moving data to and from SQL Server, Analysis Services, Sharepoint and the rest of the Microsoft Office / BI stack & thought I'd share some stuff with others who may or may not be interested...