Recent content by dmcmunn

johnherman and Hans63, First, thank you very much for your very thoughtful responses. This is just the sort of dialogue I would like to pursue. I would suggest that getting agreement on requirements well in advance of the development cycle is nearly impossible in all but the simplest of...

Hans63, I have read the ETL book from the Kimball Group and the MS DW Toolkit as well. Both very helpful reference guides for practitioners. I believe many of the agile software development tenets such as: (1) short(2-4 Week), regular time periods between deliverables, (2) initial broad...

Sad to say, but most of my Fortune 500 engagements are barely DW 1.0, much less 3.0.

Given the "almost chaos" level complexity of building business intelligence enabled enterprise data warehouses in today's world of rapidly changing multi-organization, multi-merger/acquisition, multi-national, multi-lingual corporate world, what are some agile methodologies or practices...

If you need a pre-populated Kimball-style date dimension source and the SQL/code used to build it (at least in SQL Server) give my freeware date dimension toolkit a look. http://www.ipcdesigns.com/dim_date/ Be sure to send a comment. Best regards, Don

The ETL Toolkit is in fact has a great overview on architecture with some suggestions on metadata that should be kept as data moves from the market (sources) through the kitchen (ETL processing) to the table (reporting). I will be publishing my perspective on these data structures over my...

historical trend analysis is great for relatively static systems (home loans, major appliance orders, banking) because those systems change incrementally. Where they fail and breakdown totally is in finding order in highly dynamic ("chaotic") systems, such as weather, stock market, massively...

tannu65, Barring obtaining the rationale and/or design documentation from the original data warehouse architects (there was at least 1 somewhere, right!) as Hans63 suggested, I would recommend constructing a little data profiling information for each column in each table. This can be automated...

You have what are called "VBScript components" which you can use in numerous ways to manipulate and configure other SSIS components or perform processing at runtime or even on events. However, the language used by "VBScript components" is VB.NET, not VBScript as in classic ASP, VBScript or VB...

Here is a code snippet to make the Lookup component perform a bit better... Imports System Imports System.Data Imports System.Math Imports System.Xml Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.Wrapper Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Wrapper Imports System.Data.SqlClient Imports...

For those of you moving to the wonderful world of 64-bit SQL Server 2005 and SSIS. I want to share a few of the items I have learned along the way. 1. First, make sure your 64-bit SQL 2005 is updates with SP1 and all the hotfixes for SSIS _BEFORE_ deployment of your packages and definitely...

Had to do with a permissions issue on a folder in between the highest and lowest folder containing the report.

I would guess the SQL could not be generated due to an error.

Has anyone architected a project with multiple calendars in the same project? Some of my team's challenge for a supply chain effort is being able to map calendars from different suppliers into the internal distributor's Gregorian/fiscal calendar for purposes of performance comparison. Each...