After this week comes to an end, I will be moving to the Magenic family. I say family because over the months of talking to them I quickly realized that the group at Magenic truly is a family. Not only one that holds themselves together with a high level of expertise but one that openly draws off each others knowledge and skills.

Last year I attended SQL Saturday in Iowa and enjoyed it immensely. I was glad to see a follow up for this year coming this Friday, September 18th. This year I’m very happy to announce that I will be attending Iowa’s second SQL Saturday and also contributing as a speaker. If you have never been to a SQL Saturday event, I highly recommend attending this one or another in your area. These events are free and organized by people just like you and I.

Everyone in a professional career that involves the constant evolution of computing will be successful while retaining the daily mindset that we always keep learning. This learning process does isn't limited to what we already know or what we've done. What we know and have done is the foundation of where we can lift ourselves further by learning more in-depth on our knowledge and gain new knowledge of what we may have not found ourselves needing day-today yet. This assists us to better ourselves and improve upon our skills. Our learning foundation is only as good as the manner in which we ...

Today I woke up to a little over a hundred emails from one of my database servers letting me know that my resources were jumping around like a kangaroo. In the mix of those emails I also had alerts thrown stating, [database_name_withheld] has a status of Suspect, Cleanly Shutdown. I actively monitor the state of the database being open or closed (which also shows status of suspect, recovering etc...) I recommend the same so you catch these situations. When I read the emails, I knew exactly what the setting was that had been set to true. "Auto Close"

I’m jumping into the T-SQL Tuesday fun this week. It is a busy week at that with SQL University writing and everything going on in the SQL Community. The SQL Server 2008 (R2) hottest, most favorite new feature topic had me wanting to throw SSIS out there once more and show off the Data Flow Engine changes.

This post will illustrate two methods for removing old files from directories using SSIS. This task is often used to delete old backup files and other ETL files that are not required any longer. We’ll step through two methods. First method uses a script task entirely for the removal and the logging events. This method will also have some comments in for logging and using the FireInformation method to mimic the normal logging abilities of SSIS. The FireInformation method didn’t provide much more of a performance boost so it wasn’t used here. Second method uses a Foreach ...

I will be speaking tomorrow night on SQL Server Integration Services basics for the SQL Connections group in the Chicago suburbs. Yes, the Wisconsin guy is going to go farther than Hwy 60 once again. The session, “SSIS 2008 Basics – Get up to Speed in 90 Minutes”, will be going over the fundamentals of SSIS and getting started with your own installation and development of packages. There is a lot to cover when considering SSIS basics when starting from opening the installation media, to opening BIDS for the first time. I hope everyone that attends leaves the session exci...

The importance of measuring your success is critical. My recent community efforts gave me the opportuntiy to once again put myself under the gun and measure if I can succeed in teh SQL Community.