This week there have been lots of build failures, thanks to our HipChat and TeamCity integration I’m notified constantly. As a “senior developer”, this matters to me. The problem comes down to multiple feature branches using a single CI database, which means that it isn’t always “up-to date”, hence the failing tests. In this post I’m going to show you how I fixed this by setting up TeamCity to publish a database for each of our feature branches.

To see any real benefit of using BIML you will need to combine it with C# to generate dynamic packages. The only problem is, unless you fork out $1000’s for MIST then your only alternative is BIDSHelper. This is a great tool, but one of the biggest problems is that you loose IntelliSense for C#. Lately I’ve been using *LinqPad to prototype and test C# code which I then paste into my BIML files.

Below are a few resources that I’ve discovered recently that show various ways of getting started with the Data Mining capabilities of SQL Server. Enhancing Applications with SQL Server Data Mining by Peter Myers (TechEd Australia 2013) In this excellent talk by Peter Myers, he demonstrates how easy it can be to build a data mining model then shows three different ways that they can be incorporated into an application:

For any SSIS project that contains more than a few packages chances are you have a master (or coordinator) package that controls execution of various packages within your project. In this post I’ll show you how to use Package Parameters with BIML. When I first started searching around on how to do this, I can across this sample on the BIMLScript.com site: [embed]http://bimlscript.com/Snippet/Details/73[/embed] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 <Biml xmlns="http://schemas.

If you compared the Google results for “testing c#” and “testing SSIS” you would quickly realize that testability isn’t one of the strengths of SSIS. I’ve seen a few different frameworks which were either too complicated or didn’t really work, in this post I’m going to give you my take on building an SSIS Testing Framework. The Goal The overall goal of what I wanted to achieve from my test framework:

Last year I entered the PowerBI video demo contest. Whilst I didn’t win any prizes I did learn a fair bit from going through the exercise of putting together a screencast demo (more on that another time). In this post I’m going to walk-through the web scraping part of my demo. The website that I choose to use for my demo was the National UFO Reporting Center (more for novelty sake then any serious interest).