SalesForce exposes a number of WebService APIs which can be used to access objects in an organization (see here for details). In this post I’m going to show how from a C# application you can use the Partner API. The Partner API is designed for those who want to develop applications which are agnostic to the objects in a given SalesForce account. This means that it will work for multiple organizations, which is in contrast to the Enterprise API which only works for a single organization and gives a strongly typed interface into that single organization.

This week I’ve been making some changes in one of my data warehouse projects, with the aim of making it a long lived and easy to maintain solution. One of the big changes that I made was the way I was staging the data from my different sources, and this meant re-working a whole bunch of SSIS packages. Specifically there were a bunch that pull data from SalesForce which needed to be cleaned up.

Chances are if you are using SQL Server in an enterprise environment you are probably using Active Directory groups to setup and maintain permissions, but how as a DBA do you know who the users are behind the groups and many there actually are? This is especially important for the sysadmin permission. In this article I’m going to show how to use PowerQuery to find all the users in Active Directory that have the sysadmin permission.

Also check out an updated post on - More reasons you should adopt Biml If you haven’t heard of Biml before, it stands for Business Intelligence Markup Language. Basically it allows you to describe Microsoft Business Intelligence objects (SSIS Packges, SSAS Cubes) in XML which are then generated into the actual objects. At first reading you would be forgiven for thinking that this is just going to add another step in an already long winded process to build a data warehouse.

This week I attended SQLRally Nordic edition which was held in Stockholm and I must start by saying how grateful I am to my boss for sending me. Second, thanks to all the Swedish people that spoke English to me, I had some really nice conversations with people, most of them started off “You’re Australian, but you live in London?”. Monday: Pre-Con: Data Warehouse Modeling - Making the Right Choices This workshop was the main reason I came to SQLRally.

Microsoft has started to include this very handy button in all of their new Excel add-ins. It is for people to send feedback to the Microsoft developers about problems they are having, problems they are solving or if they are generally happy with the product. This week I was using PowerQuery to see if I could use it to query Active Directory (AD) and list all the members of a specific AD Group (more on this in a future post).