I’ve really been neglecting the blog of late and have been taking a bit of a break from a lot of extra curricular business intelligence and data reading. I figured it was about time to get back to posting though, and as luck would have it, my colleague Stephen came to me with an interesting SSIS performance issue that presented the perfect opportunity for a quick blog post. I’ve not written much about SSIS lately, having been drawn off by the shiny sparkle of developments in the self-service BI sector such as Power BI, and playing with Big Data tools like Hadoop. But I still do a lot of work with SSIS and it’s still my go-to large scale ETL tool.

Just a quick post regarding a strange problem I encountered while working on an SSAS Tabular model project. Built on the same Vertipaq technology as Power Pivot, it’s very easy to get started and produce quick, efficient data models. Unlike Power Pivot, which runs as an Excel add-in, SSAS Tabular models are developed in Visual Studio via the SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) Business Intelligence add-on. However, once you load up the development environment, it’s almost exactly the same, the only difference really being that when you build a tabular model in VS, it is developed against a temporary cube on a pre-installed SSAS Tabular instance. Power Pivot just works entirely in memory, without requiring an SSAS instance.

The other week I wrote a post discussing how PowerView was the future of SQL Server Reporting Services, and the killer features that made it a compelling choice. Despite the numerous positive advances that PowerView brings to Microsoft/SQL-based reporting, there are of course a number of counter arguments. I deliberately left these out in order to look at some of these reasons in a later post.

As such, here are five reasons why PowerView, despite all its pizzazz, is simply not capable (in its current form) of replacing the venerable SSRS.

Since its introduction with SQL Server 2012, PowerView has started to become the familiar face of Microsoft’s self service business intelligence offering. Its inclusion in Excel 2013 has only reinforced its position as the premier tool for quick, interactive visualisation of data, in conjunction of course with the magnificent PowerPivot. But ask any “traditional” BI developer/architect about Reporting Services (SSRS), and it’s likely that they will staunchly defend it, decrying PowerView as a gimmick.

So here are 6 reasons why PowerView is NOT a gimmick, and may in fact be the future of SQL Server Reporting Services.

Something I see online all the time, is people trying to find a standalone download for SQL Server Management Studio.

Last year I had the fantastic opportunity to attend SQL Saturday #105 over in Dublin on the company dime.

As if renaming the accurately titled Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to the rather ambiguous SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) wasn’t bad enough, in December, Microsoft’s latest SSDT release only brought half the expected capabilities to Visual Studio 2012.

I recently posted about a quandary in which I found myself that led to me building my own extended ForEach File Enumerator in SSIS. All things considered, it was a reasonably straightforward experience, with most of my issues stemming from a relative unfamiliarity with Windows Forms development (I was always an ASP.NET man). The whole process can actually be split into four very simple steps to make things easier:

1. Create your Enumeration function.
2. Design your UI for SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT).
3. Validation and assignment of input from the UI.
4. Deploy your new component.

As long as your new custom component isn ’t too complicated, these steps can be completed very quickly, meaning you can be up and running in only a little longer than it would take to write everything in a Script Task, and think of the re-usability!