BI-Curious

Friday Bullets

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:52:23 +0000

Lately, I have been busier than not. Normally this is a good thing but it has resulted in me neglecting this blog more than I would like. I have several topics in the works but the free time just hasn’t been available to wrap them up. So, in the meantime, I’d like to start a new [...]

ETL Pattern: Staged Refresh

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:16:00 +0000

Here is a fairly common challenge: perform a complete refresh of the data in a target table. It seems pretty basic and easy. All of the existing data is replaced with the new load. There is no change detection required; just a simple load. Yet, more often than not, when I go into a client that [...]

Looking To Learn PowerShell?

Pierre LaFromboise — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:21:33 +0000

Microsoft recently released an updated version of the PowerShell Quick Reference Guide. Essentially, it is a printable booklet that has an overview of commonly used PowerShell commands. So, if you’re learning PowerShell or just need a helpful reminder, check it out. By the way, I cannot stress enough how useful PowerShell can be when working in [...]

BI Style Guides

Pierre LaFromboise — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:20:27 +0000

While catching up on blog posts I came across a post by Patrick Husting from last month. The post titled “Better looking charts in Excel 2007/2010” provides a before and after example of a chart in Excel. The simple example is meant to show the importance of adding a little style to your reports. I think [...]

SQL Server 2008 R2 Official Release Date

Pierre LaFromboise — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:34:53 +0000

Just a heads up for those who didn’t notice: yesterday Microsoft released the official release date for the next version of SQL Server. It will be generally available May 2010 and should appear on the May pricelist. I have been looking forward to some of the improvements in the upcoming release and am particularly excited about Master [...]

T-SQL Snippet: Strip Time from Datetime

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:49:22 +0000

I would have thought that this would be fairly common knowledge but I am often asked for a quick example of how to strip off the time element of a SQL datetime type. So, here is an example followed by an explanation of how and why it works: SELECT DATEADD(d,DATEDIFF(d,0,GETDATE()),0) Technically, this doesn’t strip the time but [...]

WP-simplesyntaxhighlighter Update

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:24:49 +0000

A new version of the core SyntaxHighlighter that wp-simplesyntaxhighlighter wraps has been released. As a result, I have released a new version of the WordPress plug-in that reflects this latest revision. You can find a quick list of the changes here.

BI Revision/Version/Source Control

Pierre LaFromboise — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:58:20 +0000

This is a continuation on my previous rants on borrowing traditional software development concepts for a BI project. As the title suggests, the topic today is source control. No matter what you want to call it, a cornerstone of any good software project should be source control. This is pretty fundamental for software projects but it [...]

PowerShell Snippet: Installed Applications

Pierre LaFromboise — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:29:44 +0000

I am finally getting around to installing Windows 7 on my laptop. Before I wipe everything I wanted to have an idea of what I currently have installed. So, I put together a little PowerShell script: Get-WMIObject Win32_product | sort-object vendor | format-table name, version, vendor, caption -autosize | out-file installed.txt -width 250 It is a pretty [...]

SharePoint 2010

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:41:24 +0000

The 2009 SharePoint conference wrapped up earlier today. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend. However, I did try to keep up by watching all of the tweets and blog posts that were being generated by the attendees. Here is a quick list of some of the more interesting SharePoint 2010 news: SharePoint 2010 beta should be [...]