f you’ve been working with Azure in the last few years, you’ve noticed there is a relatively new feature that’s supposed to make identity management easier with your Azure solutions: Azure Active Directory (AAD). This feature does work with Azure SQL Servers and Azure SQL Databases. But it may not completely plug and play. In…
SSIS Parameters and Sensitive Information
One of the questions I get when teaching others how to use Biml is how do you deal with sensitive information like usernames and passwords in your Biml Solution. No one wants to leave this information in plain text in a solution. You need access to it while interrogating your sources and destination connections for metadata….
Biml Solutions and Limited Rights
Handling source system metadata changes automatically are pretty easy with BimlScript. There are several solutions available online check here, here, and here. Recently, a client brought up a scenario that put a kink in the usual solution. The client supported multiple tenants, and they wanted to segregate the tasks of handling the metadata changes from…
BimlExpress Directions for the Interrogator
The Biml Interrogator demo was designed to show Biml Developers how to extract useful metadata from sources that do not natively support it. Originally it was designed for delimited text files and Excel files, but it could be used for other sources with a little work. My demos walk you through the different steps you’d…
Biml Interrogator using BimlStudio
I’m pulling the directions for using the interrogator out of the main page into this separate page since I don’t have the project files on hand. You can use the BimlExpress files with these instructions, but you will need to adjust the code slightly. If you run in to troubles, let me know. Open Biml\Interrogator\BimlStudio…
Manipulating SSIS Executables with PowerShell
Welcome back to my mini-series on Powershell, SQLPSX, and the awesome things you can do with your packages through POSH. You can catch up by reading this, this and this. You’ve got all that, right? Good! Now, do you have a clone of my ManageETLDemo on your machine? Is it up to date? Great! In…
PowerShell, SSIS Packages and Writing Variables
Last time, I introduced you to SQLPSX. Then we spun through our SSIS packages looking for a specific variable. That’s where I started my PowerShell managing SSIS journey. After I was able to spin through all my packages and see that some of my packages weren’t following the “standard”, I need to go into several…
PowerShell Management for Your SSIS Packages
In addition to working on my database sharding presentation I’ve been working on upgrading an ETL framework. In learning this new framework I dug into the business logic as to what the framework was trying to load, looked into all the auditing that was currently captured, and I looked for gaps when packages didn’t perform…
Migration to Windows Azure SQL Database:Step 4 and 5
Now that you’ve completed analyzing your current database, and worked through that list of items that won’t work with Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD), it’s time to begin testing your new solution. Testing begins with setting up your test instance of WASD, and loading your test data, then you point your application to that new…
Migration to Windows Azure SQL Database: Step 3b
Last time I walked you through how to see if your database will work with Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD) using the Migration Wizard on Codeplex. It’s an easy tool to learn to use, and it answers the question what won’t work if I migrate to SQL Azure. It will even help you perform the…