Three ways to model the same ETL task in SSIS. One takes 10 minutes and is straightforward. One takes hours, 40 components in the data flow, and won’t survive the next requirements change. The question “how much SQL belongs in an SSIS package?” decides maintainability, readability, and development speed — not tool loyalty. In this … Read more
Anyone diffing two versions of an SSIS package sees change markers scattered across the XML even for a trivial rename — eight “changed regions” in this article’s example, and the diff doesn’t even attribute the rename to the right task. The same modification in a stored procedure shows a three-line diff and is reviewable in … Read more
A SQL Server Agent job that needs to read a CSV file from a file share fails with Access is denied — the agent’s service account has no permission on that share. Instead of piling ever more rights onto the service account, the job step switches identity: impersonation at runtime, configured in SQL Server Agent through a proxy. One limit … Read more
Read a CSV file, transform the data, load the result into SQL Server: for the file part, SSIS is the obvious choice, for the transformation pure T-SQL. The best solution is often a combination of both. There is no single right way, but there are three decision criteria against which every concrete choice should be … Read more
Anyone who writes a 200-line SELECT with a recursive CTE understands it completely while writing it — and three weeks later, not a word of it. Inline comments are the safety net against that. The problem: placed badly, they destroy the very readability they are meant to preserve. What this article covers: Prerequisite: The examples run against AdventureWorksDW2017 (table [dbo].[DimEmployee], a … Read more
An SSIS package fails, and the execution log is supposed to point to the cause. Instead it presents a tree in which the tasks do not appear in the order they ran, but alphabetically by name. For complex packages that log becomes plainly unreadable. The good news is that a well-considered naming convention makes it … Read more
If you can’t tell at a glance where the WHERE clause of a 200-line SELECT statement starts and ends, you have a structure problem — not a content problem. This article shows how to format SQL statements so that SELECT, FROM, WHERE and JOIN stay immediately recognizable even in long queries. → Part of a series. This is part 2 and covers statement structure (SELECT, WHERE, FROM, JOIN). The basics for … Read more
Anyone who has ever had to debug a badly or completely unformatted SELECT with 30 columns and half a dozen joins knows the feeling: it isn’t the SQL that eats up your day — it’s hunting down what the statement is actually trying to do. SQL formatting isn’t a matter of taste; it’s a maintenance … Read more
A SQL statement that looks neatly indented on one developer’s machine collapses into a staircase on a colleague’s — even though nobody touched the code. The culprit is almost always a difference in editor settings: a different tab width, tabs instead of spaces, a non-monospaced font. Readable SQL code in a team doesn’t start with … Read more
A complex SQL statement is hard enough to read on its own — shifting coding styles in the same file turn every line into an extra re-orientation task. SQL formatting is therefore a team responsibility, not a personal matter of taste. At a glance: Prerequisites: SQL Server or Postgres — the series was written in 2018 with … Read more
