Monday, June 29, 2009

Pimp my Notebook


After months of feeling so sorry for my Hp notebook and prayed silently that i can afford a new mac pro. decided to shape it up a bit. Stepped up d RAM to blazing 4G, OS to Win 7, HD to 320GB (7200rpm) and then adorn it with these stickers.
That should get d Mac off my mind 4 some months hopefully till apple rethinks its pricing.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Hi Pal!

A dear friend I met at the summit earlier in the year.

summit pix

He had this as cover of his presentation in China just after the summit. Hi Pal!

Record Value Frequency

First I’d like to quote my recent tweet on this issue

Have always considered SSIS to be extremely flexible but lately found wrong. Nevertheless, yet to find any ETL too that can beat it


I think I may have been wrong to blame this on SSIS but rather on limitations of TSQL itself. My situation is a need to have frequency of a record value indicated in a column as indices as below





ValueSEQNR
11
21
22
41
42
43



I tried to use Rank() with partition as shown in snippet below but got a different result. Also ‘Bing(ed) this but came up void of a similar issue.



select value, Rank() over (partition by Value order by Value)



This is like to use and inject into SSIS package. Doing this with combination of SSIS task is not quite straightforward.



The only way I could see out of this is to write a CLR function to achieve this which I am feeling so lazy to do but still has to be done.

Monday, June 08, 2009

Ftp’ing files in Folder in SSIS

Recently, I came across a need to copy all csv files generated from an SSIS process to a Unix server. FTP became handy for this purpose. The FTP SSIS task will not work with folder/directories – came up with error message

File Usage type of connection "xxxxxx" should be "FileExists" for operation Send



This error message is quite misleading. The interpretation is that once you the File Connection Manager being used in the FTP task has a property Usage Type and this Usage Type must be set to “File exists”. This automatically limits the usage of the FTP task to files rather than folder/directories.



The solution is to use the Foreach Loop Container task and place the FTP task within it. Literarily, the loop container enumerates all the files and place them in a variable. This variable is then used in the FTP task.



image 
Foreach Loop Container with FTP task embedded



image


Loop Container configuration



image


FTP task configuration

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Gearing up for TechEd Africa 2009

TechEd Africa 2009 – Potential Lives Here

http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/invitations/2009/may/teched/images/TechEd_header.jpg

‘TechEd is in its 10th year and is positioned to be the best yet! As promised, this is your pre-notification that the TechEd Africa 2009 website is now live and open for registration!

Be sure to take advantage of the Super Early Bird offer and forward this invite to your Colleagues and friends’

Be part of the experience. So much to discover. Hundreds of ways to learn.

Dates: 2-5 August 2009
Venue: Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre, Durban

For all Microsoft Tech•Ed registration and event-related questions,
e-mail us at: info@tech-ed.co.za

http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/invitations/2009/may/teched/images/TechEd_superearly-01.gif http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/invitations/2009/may/teched/images/TechEd_whoshould-01.gif
SUPER EARLY BIRD SPECIAL
Offer expires 29th of May 2009
Who should attend?
Any and all technology professionals interested in exploring a broad set of current and upcoming Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms and services

 

http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/invitations/2009/may/teched/images/TechEd_register-01.gif http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/invitations/2009/may/teched/images/TechEd_forward-01.gif
BOOK
NOW.

FORWARD
TO FRIEND.

Monday, June 01, 2009

Pix from Events

Picture from some of the Developer Events I attended recently. Just thought I should share this.

DSC00562

With Anders Hejlsberg (MVP Summit ‘09)

 CIMG0026

with Don Box (PDC ‘08)

 CIMG0018

With Scott Guthrie (Mr. Red Shirt – PDC ‘08)

 Picture 009

with Ingo Rammer (PDC ‘08)

CIMG0143

with Ken Spann (PDC ‘08)

ADAM on Windows 7

Recently has a need to program authentication for an application using ADAM. This is something I have done in the past so got a good existing code I could leverage on.

Alas! ADAM would not install on Windows 7. I It kept returning “Out of Storage” error!

image

This has been a known problem in Windows Vista as can be seen in the blog post Shawn Cicoria – CedarLogic, Extemporaneous Mumblings

Tried out these tricks and still got another error message on execution of the adaminstall.exe

image image