Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Concepts

Let’s say your manager wants you to send summary information of the package (not just a one line message) that you’re running or even if there’s an error occurred during the package run. What will you do? I’m sure BI Express is a good option for this task, also you can create your custom message string and send it through send mail task and execute sql task by passing variable value. I want to see summary of the package run in email msg, please include following information: 1) Package Start Time 2) Package Completed with Success/Failure 3) Look up Match Records 4) Look up Not Match Records 5) Package End Time You can use the execute sql task in your package and create custom string using the sql code. After this step store the result set value as a single row and use the variable (SendMail)   SELECT 'SSIS Started: ' + CAST ( ? AS VARCHAR ( 50 ))   + char ( 10 ) + char ( 13 )   + 'Package Completed Succssfully'   + char ( 10 ) + char...

Errors can occur at any stage when you extract data from source and load it into destination. You must include error handling method for your package to test and troubleshoot. There are several ways to handle it at different levels during your process. Either you can use default features provided by SSIS or you can develop your own method to handle the error. Ex: at a control flow level, if an error occurs, you can add a failure constraint and redirects the workflow to an alternate task. In data flow, if an error occurs, you can send the row out to an error path and save it to review later. There is also an event handling capabilities that let you add OnError events in a separate window. You can either write custom script or just send an email to a team to notify the error. Here, I am not talking about default features provided by SSIS to handle the error. Let's say, you are developing the package and an error occurs, you should know where to look to identify what happened during...

When creating an efficient and robust solution for Extract, Transform and Load Process, Lot of things do matter especially when you are working with huge size of databases. Challenge is not only to meet functional requirements Also to look at the performance requirements. Here, I would like to cover most of the part on extracting and loading process, I will not discuss (Buffer usage, Execution tree, Parallelism etc.) You will find those details here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966529.aspx Let’s discuss few necessary steps when we want to optimize the extracting and loading process in the package. Before you make any changes in your package, always use SSIS advance functionality to monitor and log metadata about package execution (SSIS Logging, SSIS Performance Counter, and SQL Server Profiler) Steps you should check while creating SSIS package: 1.    Remove unwanted columns from the source and set data types appropriately; this will help you with buffer ...

KPI - Key Performance Indicator is used as a measure of performance (success/failure) of a particular activity. Sometime it is very useful to define a new strategy for the organization. Let's talk about KPI in SSRS 2008 R2 , they have introduced new item in toolbox called 'Indicator' . So we directly drag and drop that indicator to define KPIs in 2008 R2. There are many choices available for KPI presentation like Directional, Symbols, Shapes, Ratings in SSRS 2008 R2.  But in SSRS 2005, 2008 version , There are two ways to define KPIs in the reports 1) by adding images and image value expression and 2) by adding a new column with background color expression. 1) Ex. you want to define KPIs for sales amount > 200 'Green', <= 200 and >= 100 'Yellow', <100 'Red' Simply add a new column and go to the background color property -->add expression there Method1: (Using IIF statement) =iif(fields!salesamt.va...

We use more than one dataset in many of the reports and we always think to join or merge datasets to provide a good solution in reports but we were not able to do it in 2005 or 2008, but now the time has come and microsoft has finally included some cool functions (Lookup, LookupSet, MultiLookup) in SSRS 2008 R2 Let's see how "LOOKUP" works here, Suppose we have a two datasets in the report, ex. one dataset (Store) has store information (StoreID, StoreName, Location, $ Sales etc, Date) and second dataset (Sales) has sales information. (StoreID, Date, Target $ Sales etc.) I will directly grab a columns from first dataset but I also want to display target sales amount as a new column with this information. Now you can use Lookup function here in a new column =LOOKUP(Fields!StoreID.Value,Fields!StoreID.Value,Fields!TargetSales.Value,"Sales") In Lookup function, you need to pass following things:   Value form the first dataset to join with second dataset ...

When you try to set up Tablix property for keep header visible while scrolling, you will see that it is not working in SSRS 2008 or SSRS 2008 R2. You need to take some extra steps to set up this property 1)       Uncheck keep header visible while scrolling tab under tablix property                            2)       Go to Grouping and Click on the right side arrow (Advanced Mode) 3)       Select the first Static Property in Row Groups (In your report first row should display column headers) 4)       Make Fixed Data = True                  5)       Run the report and you will get column headers visible while scrolling Hope it helps! Thanks