Are you interested in automating your deployment process? Leave a comment and I would be more than happy to help you along the path, you won’t look back! At DrDoctor we are currently under going a massive initiative to automate our deployment process. We have made excellent progress over the last couple of months, and as it stands we can confidently and effortlessly release new versions of the various software components of the system (IIS websites, Windows services).

The last few weeks I’ve been working with Nancy (an awesome web framework for .Net), the core goal of the framework is the super-duper-happy path: The goal of the framework is to stay out of the way as much as possible and provide a super-duper-happy-path to all interactions. This means that everything in Nancy is setup to have sensible defaults and conventions, instead of making you jump through hoops and go through configuration hell just to get up and running.

Biml from what I have observed is still in it’s infancy. Don’t get me wrong, what can actually be done with Biml is impressive, however it seems to me how we are using it and how we are talking about it still needs to mature before it can be fully and effectively embraced by the community at large. There is a growing number of people in the SQL Server community that are contributing excellent guidance and driving forward its maturity, as well as BimlScript.

This week there have been lots of build failures, thanks to our HipChat and TeamCity integration I’m notified constantly. As a “senior developer”, this matters to me. The problem comes down to multiple feature branches using a single CI database, which means that it isn’t always “up-to date”, hence the failing tests. In this post I’m going to show you how I fixed this by setting up TeamCity to publish a database for each of our feature branches.

To see any real benefit of using BIML you will need to combine it with C# to generate dynamic packages. The only problem is, unless you fork out $1000’s for MIST then your only alternative is BIDSHelper. This is a great tool, but one of the biggest problems is that you loose IntelliSense for C#. Lately I’ve been using *LinqPad to prototype and test C# code which I then paste into my BIML files.

Below are a few resources that I’ve discovered recently that show various ways of getting started with the Data Mining capabilities of SQL Server. Enhancing Applications with SQL Server Data Mining by Peter Myers (TechEd Australia 2013) In this excellent talk by Peter Myers, he demonstrates how easy it can be to build a data mining model then shows three different ways that they can be incorporated into an application: