About a year ago, I wrote about getting SquishIt up and running with the (awesome) Nancy Web Framework. You can read all about that here. Since then, things have changed a bit, as they are wont to do. I had mostly been ignoring this project, until an issue came up on the SquishIt mailing list that forced me to fire it up again. The biggest change I found is that Nancy no longer depends on System.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Recently I ran into the following error when compiling BIML into SSIS packages: The message itself is not very revealing: The data type for input buffer column 'True' on the ScriptComponent input buffer 'Input0' does not match the mapped output column from the previous transformation. You might have guessed it already; there is no column called True in the data flow. A quick Google search brought back this topic on the Varigence forums: Error: Script Transformation.
On Saturday, March 29, 2014, Madison, WI will host its third annual SQL Saturday. I’ve been involved in organizing and presenting at all three events and I’m excited to say this will be our best year yet! One of the new, exciting additions is three pre-cons. These are one-day, in-depth training events, held the Friday before, that will cover one topic. At $100, they are a steal – a full day of training, from experienced individuals, in a small classroom setting.
Late in November, the Azure Storage team announced an update of the Storage Library that corresponds with the “2013-08-15” Storage API update. They weren’t explicit about it in the release post, but this was a major version upgrade to Azure Storage SDK 3.0. The 3.0.2 Storage SDK is not part of an official Azure SDK release, the Azure 2.2 SDK officially shipped with Azure Storage 2.1.0.2 (release notes). I expect the next Azure SDK will include this Storage SDK (or perhaps a 3.
Some time ago I added a script component to a few SSIS packages to compare rows with each other using a hash to check if they had actually changed or not. In the output of the script component, I had chosen a string data type for the calculated hash with a length of 66 characters. In the destination table, I created a column with data type char(66) to store the hash value.
For the preparation of my upcoming talk about SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services on the Microsoft Business Analytics Day (hosted by my company element61), I read the book Master Data Services 2nd edition by Tyler Graham. I had almost no prior experience with MDS up to this point (I very quickly glanced over it in preparation for the 70-463 exam and I guess I didn't answer a lot of questions about MDS correctly), so I needed a book that could introduce me to the concepts of MDS and how I can effectively manage master data using this tool.
When I was writing my blogpost yesterday about Gallus I started by using SQL server compact edition. Because it is easy to use and more or less compatible with sql server. And I found out that for my case sql server compact edition was less compatible. SQL server compact edition does not support multiple statements in one command. Which is what we do when we use QueryMultiple in dapper. And you will happy to know that the person who wrote the errormessage doesn’t really care about you as the user.
A certain David McSorley on twitter told me had written a better dapper. One that could load collections which is something dapper doesn’t do. The project is called Gallus and is on github. But not yet on nuget. So I set out and tried it. Being that it is not on nuget and thus it has no compiled version of it and I work with VB.Net I had to create a second project, namely a C# class library.
I finished my first book of this year and here's the review! After I finished the newest edition of Ralph Kimball's Data Warehouse Toolkit, a senior colleague of mine recommended the book Star Schema The Complete Reference by Christopher Adamson. To be honest, I had never heard about it. But was I wrong: this book is an absolute must read for every data warehouse professional who takes himself/herself seriously. The book is extremely well written and it explains the concepts of star schemas (hence the title of course) very thoroughly with great detailed examples.
About two weeks ago, LessThanDot completely switched blog engines from B2Evolution to WordPress. We did this in the middle of the day on a Sunday, with a minimum of stress or downtime and without any noticeable complaints from our 50-60,000 monthly visitors. Read on for details on the migration, why we chose WordPress, and some of the positives and negatives we have found so far. The Migration My philosophy on migrations is to make them as seamless as possible, so that wherever possible users just don’t notice that you have pulled a website out from under them and replaced it with a new one.