I decided to try a small workflow experiment this week and try to go paperless both at work and at home. I'm a big notetaker and scribbler, and I've normally got two or three notepads on the go at the one time. Having purchased a Griffin stylusfor the iPad last week, it felt like a good time to try and ditch the paper and go digital. I started the experiment while working.

Inspired by the Enoughpodcast and Minimal Macsite, both by Patrick Rhone, I've been thinking about how little software I'd need to do all the things I need to, both for work and leisure purposes. I've been patiently waiting on the new Macbook Air refresh, as I'm looking to replace my 15″ 2008 Macbook Pro. I've still not decided if I'm going 11″ or 13″, although the latter is looking more likely.

Here's a quick how-to post, a little work-around for an issue with writing to Excel from SSIS. I've been asked a few times how to use SSIS to delete data from an Excel spreadsheet, then write data into that blank spreadsheet, while maintaining the column headers in the first row. There is no particularly straightforward way of doing so in SSIS, as attempting a delete statement on the Excel sheet will either remove the data in all rows (including the header) or throw an error as the DELETE statement is not supported.

I had an issue this morning whereby I was trying to deploy an SSIS 2008 project using the Deployment Manifest, and was hitting the following error: Could not save the package “Package Path” to SQL Server “SQL Server”. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:The package failed to load due to error 0xC0011008 “Error loading from XML. No further detailed error information can be specified for this problem because no Events object was passed where detailed error information can be stored.

Just after Adam Machanic announced the first of the T-SQL Tuesday blog events, I was asked a question about how to return a list of all the dates between two given days. I came across some good forum posts about how to do so, many of which utilised numbers tables. I wanted to avoid that (nothing against them, just wanted something that was stand-alone), and figured that a CTE would be the best way to go; in fact someone had posted such a method, a little of which I have used here (if I can find the post again I'll give them a mention in the comments!

This is one I used to use a lot, and had cause to use it this morning. An ETL process to truncate a staging table was being blocked by another process on the server, and I needed to identify exactly what command the blocking process was attempting to execute. I found the SPID by executing sp_who2, which showed me the SPID that was blocking the truncate command (in this case SPID 54).

I've had a couple of issues recently with using the tinyint datatype in SSIS. In one case I have a Lookup Transform which joins to the incoming data flow path on a column defined as a tinyint in the database. The column metadata in the data flow is DT_I4, a four-byte signed integer. Dragging this across to the tinyint column in the Lookup gives me the following error: The following columns cannot be mapped: [DataFlowColumn, LookupColumn] One or more columns do not have supported data types, or their data types do not match.

I travelled down to Manchester last weekend to go to the SQLBits conference, something that I'd heard a lot of good things about. I'm very glad I went, as it was an extremely useful and informative event. And free! 🙂 With 28 sessions being given by 28 speakers, there was plenty of choice on what to go to…possibly too much as I missed out on a few that I would have really liked to have seen.

Following up from yesterday's post about SDS, there is now a Q&A about the announced changes on the SDS Team Blog: SDS Q&A

Now this is a bit interesting! On Tuesday, the SQL Data Services team announced that SDS would offer full relational database capabilities. This has really perked my interest now, as I was never fully comfortable with the ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) data model. Now that SDS is going to support Stored Procedures, Views, Indexes and even Triggers, I think this is a product to get excited about. Of course, the announcement means I still have more questions than answers!