In the past I have written extensively about how to build custom components for SQL Server Integration Services, these posts have always been focused on the ‘happy path’, if you’re not familiar with this phrase it refers to the path through your application that works exactly as expected. Often times in development we have to deal with the sad path, or when things aren’t working as we would like or expect.

This post is an extension of Tutorial 12 from Hortonworks (original here), which shows how to use Apache Flume to consume entries from a log file and put them into HDFS. One of the problems that I see with the Hortonworks sandbox tutorials (and don’t get me wrong, I think they are great) is the assumption that you already have data loaded into your cluster, or they demonstrate an unrealistic way of loading data into your cluster - uploading a csv file through your web browser.

A couple of weeks ago I was doing some work on an internal reporting cube. One of the measures required represents an ‘order backlog’, that is orders that have been received but haven’t yet been provisioned in our systems. The Problem The fact table looks something like this: A row will appear in the fact table after the order has been closed, with the provisioned date being set to NULL until it has been provisioned.

The Microsoft PowerBI Competition is now in full swing with the voting open to the public for the next week. (Check out my entry). As you can see below I just made my submission in time. I like to cut it fine! When I came to building my demo (check it out) I had a few different data sets in mind, but there were two main points that I wanted to highlight from my entry -

Previously I’ve written about the database unit testing framework tSQLt, you can read about it here, there is also an excellent Pluralsight course by Dave Green (blog | twitter) which you can find here. In this post I’m going to show you a method of version controlling your database and unit tests with SQL Server Database Projects in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). Setting up the Solution In my solution I’ve created two SQL Server Database Projects

Last week I was looking through the Recently Published Courses list on Pluralsight and noticed one on Database Unit Testing (check it out). Given that it was quiet at work as not everyone was back from holidays I thought it would be a good time to look into it. What is tSQLt? tSQLt (website) is a testing framework for SQL Server, that basically means it provides (almost) everything you need to write tests against your database.