Also check out an updated post on - More reasons you should adopt Biml If you haven’t heard of Biml before, it stands for Business Intelligence Markup Language. Basically it allows you to describe Microsoft Business Intelligence objects (SSIS Packges, SSAS Cubes) in XML which are then generated into the actual objects. At first reading you would be forgiven for thinking that this is just going to add another step in an already long winded process to build a data warehouse.

This week I attended SQLRally Nordic edition which was held in Stockholm and I must start by saying how grateful I am to my boss for sending me. Second, thanks to all the Swedish people that spoke English to me, I had some really nice conversations with people, most of them started off “You’re Australian, but you live in London?”. Monday: Pre-Con: Data Warehouse Modeling - Making the Right Choices This workshop was the main reason I came to SQLRally.

Microsoft has started to include this very handy button in all of their new Excel add-ins. It is for people to send feedback to the Microsoft developers about problems they are having, problems they are solving or if they are generally happy with the product. This week I was using PowerQuery to see if I could use it to query Active Directory (AD) and list all the members of a specific AD Group (more on this in a future post).

This is an update to my previous post about loading data into HDFS. After using the component a few times I realized that having to pass in a list of files to upload seemed a bit odd inside of a Data Flow task. So instead I have changed the component to be an SSIS Task, instead of a Destination. This means that it is used in the Control Flow of a package, instead of in a Data Flow task.

Currently in Australia there has been some news reports of Federal MPs abusing their expenses…. So I thought I would take a look at what publicly available data there is and then use the Microsoft Excel Power* (PowerQuery, PowerPivot, PowerView) tools to do some analysis. This post is about using PowerQuery to pull data from the Department of Finance website into Excel and get it into shape to be used with PowerPivot.

This year I have been fortunate enough to have been able to attend a few different SQL Server community events. Back in May I attended SQLBits XI, which was a fantastic experience and opened my eyes to the #SQLFamily. I learnt a lot about SQL Server, but I think what I really learnt is that there is an amazing online community for SQL Server professionals. Then a couple of weeks ago I was at #sqlsat228 in Cambridge, where I attended a Friday pre-con on Big Data with Jen Stirrup and Allan Mitchell followed by a full day of sessions on the Saturday.