Category: Uncategorized

BIML: Columbus SQL Server User Group

I am pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting on BIML for the Columbus SQL Server User Group on December 11th at the Microsoft Polaris office in Westerville, OH. If you’re located in or around the central OH area, please consider joining us! Here is a link to the chapter website.

Rethink your ETL with BIML

It’s estimated that 70% of data warehousing development is in ETL (extract, transformation, and load) between the different source systems, your data warehouse, and/or your data mart. Recently a new tool has entered the marked that promised to revolutionize the way we think about ETL processes. Gone are the days where we need to manually code every component, every event handler, and painstakingly ensure that every package adheres to corporate standards. In this session, Chris and Harsh will introduce you to the world of BIML and how it can change your world. We’ll show you how to quickly create a template in BIML that will make sure all of your packages adhere to corporate standards, and then use metadata to quickly generate dozens of packages to populate your dimensions and facts. Stop spending weeks developing SSIS packages that can be built in hours! You won’t want to miss this session that will get your boss to say “I don’t think we’re paying you enough!”

~Chris

Using the netonly switch

The company I currently work for keeps all of their environments in separate domains. Not an uncommon scenario, so OK, we can work with it. However, the challenge has always been how to have a shared database development location that everyone can use without remoting over to the machine. The problem with that is handling multiple people. It works fine until you reach a predetermined number of developers (2). Since the development machines are in a different domain, simply right-clicking, selecting runas, and passing new credentials doesn’t work. The answer, as with most things, lies in a simple change. It’s called netonly, and it’s extremely handy.

To use it, open up notepad, type in the code, and then save it as a batch file.  Then you can authenticate across! I use this regularly to connect across the domain to our servers in our development domain while staying on my local machine. DOMAIN\username is the domain\username that you want to pass in.

runas /netonly /user:DOMAIN\username  “Program File Path”

For example, for SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 the file path would be below (on 32 bit windows xp, don’t ask :)):

runas /netonly /user:DOMAIN\username “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\ssms.exe”

NOW we’re getting somewhere. Next point is what if you want to pass the DOMAIN\username in as a variable(so you can pass this awesome new tool you found around to everyone in your shop)?

Again, the answer is just a quick change to our code.

@echo off

set /p user=”Username: ”

runas /netonly /user:%user% “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe”

Now we can take this and use to authenticate quickly and easily across domains using the credentials we want, even when crossing to a different domain.

 

Hope it helps you in your travels.

 

One more quick note: This is my first blog post, so feedback is appreciated. 🙂