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. Yep, the December 2012 SSDT download was missing a key component: the project and item templates for developing MS BI projects in Visual Studio. Thankfully, the newest release (5th March, 2013) has finally added all of the MS BI templates to SSDT, so you can now develop SSIS packages, SSAS cubes and SSRS reports in the Visual Studio 2012 environment.

I recently posted some thoughts regarding Microsoft’s Windows-compatible Hadoop implementation, HDInsight. I was investigating it for a project that I figured would benefit from a distributed processing approach, although ultimately decided to pursue other alternatives. It led our team to make some quite interesting discoveries about Hadoop, and some scenarios of when current distributed processing solutions are and aren’t appropriate.

Hadoop. Everyone and their dog is talking about it. That and “Big Data”. There was an excellent post on Brent Ozar’s DBA Reactions Tumblr blog recently that encapsulated it perfectly, titled “When the executives ask if we’re Hadooping”. It’s a valid point though, Hadoop is mentioned in just about every article these days, along with the phrase “Big Data” (which I personally don’t like at all). The consensus, at least on the surface, seems to be that Hadoop will solve everyone’s problems, process anything, oh and bring world peace while it’s doing that. My sarcastic tone belies a genuine interest in playing about with it though. With so many people talking about Hadoop (in its many implementations), I was very keen to get an opportunity to try it for myself.

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!

One of the primary reasons for using SSIS is to process multiple files, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) data, and feed it into a destination, for example, a data warehouse. Built-in components such as the For Loop Container and the ForEach Loop Container make it very simple to enumerate a collection and perform some processing tasks for each entry, be it an array, a dataset, or a directory containing files. In fact, the ForEach File Enumerator option of the ForEach Loop Container allows you to even specify a mask to filter the list of files in a directory prior to processing, so you can weed out unwanted files from the loop. But what if a simple string match isn’t powerful enough to perform the filtering you need?

With the year drawing to a close, I thought it would be the perfect time to recap the major developments in Microsoft Business Intelligence throughout 2012. Unsurprisingly, the launch of SQL Server 2012 proved to be the focal point of this year’s releases, although we had a few extra surprises along the way:

I ran into a rather strange situation recently while attempting to set up some new calculated measures in an SSAS cube. I’m still new to MDX, so I ended up chasing my tail around for a while (and crying out for help on both StackOverflow and MSDN) before I eventually tracked down the culprit and solved the issue. Basically, I was trying to create a calculated measure, which, using a couple of date attributes from one dimension, would apply to my [Time] dimension and filter the value of a specified measure to match. Not hard, right?

Love them or hate them, there’s no escaping infographics these days. They are EVERYWHERE. Personally, I’m a fan. I’ve always been interested in visualisation techniques and better ways to represent data visually. After all, the human brain can process images and patterns much faster than it can text. The best visualisations are the ones that need no explanation, while the worst are the ones that basically just overlay some text or numbers on some graphics and still make you read the content to understand what’s going on. Even then though, I’m a sucker for a nice infographic (yes, event the overly textual ones).

Anyway, the point of this post was to show off a little infographic that I received from Xbox LIVE Rewards the other day to celebrate 10 years of Xbox LIVE, and illustrate my contribution to that: