Well, unfortunately I can’t stay for the remaining sessions. It’s my mother’s birthday party tonight and I doubt I’d make many points by missing it. 
It’s been a great weekend with lots of topics and networking. I’m eagerly waiting for San Diego and LA Code Camps. Hopefully by then we’ll have a solution ready for recording the session.
Take care all!
Bret Stateham is giving this talk. He is a great presenter. Very animated and speaks clearly. He also explains complicated details very easily in a friendly manner. If you have a chance to hear this guy speak definitely take advantage of that!
Boy I wish I had a recording of this. I’d love my two DBA colleagues to see this. All but two of our SQL servers are 2000, simply because that’s the latest available when the systems were installed. It works great but you don’t have access to the great tools, such as SSIS, in 2005 or 2008. I’ve pinged Lynn Langit and Daniel Egan about possibly being a resource for recording these sessions in the future. You can read about the initial details in my blog post here. <update>OK, here’s an update. I’m 45 minutes into the session and Bret is hilarious! He definitely makes this topic a lot of fun by his passion and animated style. Lots o’ fun!</update>
This is really an intro to SSIS, which is exactly what I need. His Data Flow Task talk is the next session.
One data source we’re looking to need is an SFTP site. Currently this isn’t in SSIS but we do have a vendor’s connector from n\ Software. This will be fun to try out. If for some reason it doesn’t work out Bret said we can create one through the Script Task or even a formal task developed in C#. I may end up doing something like this to hit our GIS server using REST. I did see a Web Task and it’s quite possible that it can consume REST already. This means that we’d have to consume XML and possibly convert this to some other usable format if necessary.
Bret just gave a great tip that may have frustrated me for a while. The variables you create a scoped. If you have a task selected and you create a variable, that variable will be scoped to that task, meaning it will only be available to that task and will disappear after that task is finished. Chances are you want your variable to be accessible by other tasks in your package. In this case make sure you click an empty area of your design surface prior to creating the variable. That will scope it to the package itself.
In SSIS 2005 you could only write Scripts in VB .Net, however, in 2008 you have the ability to use C#.
Man! Debugging in SSIS is awesome! I can’t way to dive into this stuff at work.
Loops, Sequence Containers and Groups:
Loops are exactly as they sound. The allow you to take a set of tasks and loop through them, much like a subroutine.
Sequence Containers do not loop. They do, however, offer scope and environment properties. You can define variables that are only available the that sequence. You can also set transaction properties on that individual container. Maybe you have several different containers each with their own transaction level. Pretty neat.
Groups are simply a design feature. They are simply there for organizing the items on your design surface but have no properties and no impact on the package at all.
The For Each Loop allows you to specify the collection your picking items from. The possibilities include XML objects (for each node) and even SMO (SQL Management Objects) for things like “for each server do this”. That’s pretty cool.
Bret showed a great example where he needs to process files every day that may not have the same filename. For instance this may be an AS400 dumping csv files that were time stamped. He generates what the filename should be in a Script Task, saves that into a variable, and then his File Task uses that variable as it’s connection string. Sweet. We need to do this as well and this would really help.
This was a great talk. SSIS is definitely something I’ve been looking to get into ever since SQL 2005. It looks like this is something I can dive into right away. For the more complex things Bret recommended the book Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services from Wrox.
Unfortunately I can’t attend Bret’s next session since I’m attending Mike Roth’s Asterisk session. Mike and I are working on a side project together using Asterisk, so I should give audience support and also learn what the heck we’ll be using! 
This is given by Ben Aminnia.
He’s really putting an emphasis on planning, which is great. Lynn Langit said her new book has the first 5 chapters devoted to what needs to be done before you even open BIDS.
Ben has an interesting presentation style, at least for this talk. He’s giving it like his company has an existing Analysis Services project that we are interviewing to possibly take over. I’m not quite sure yet we are on the driving end (we are really interviewing Ben to see if we want to take the job) or on the other end (he is interviewing us to see if we’re qualified to take the job). I hope more of the former since I’m at the talk because I don’t know anything about SSAS.
While he is doing and interview style here at Code Camp he is assuming we don’t know about SSAS so that’s a good strategy to take. He just gave a really good 4 minute background on Analysis in general and what a Cube is (since I raised my hand because I didn’t know! )
During this talk Ben is using the example of a system that monitors disk space availability (among other data). He actually has a great real world system for doing just this. It is based on the cover story of the February 2008 issue of SQL Server Magazine. You can find the online version here. It’s a very complex SSIS package but it allowed Ben to do this without having to spend months developing it. For him it works great and is easy to maintain. Ben has even made his own additions and discussed these changes with the original author. If you contact Ben directly (ben at sql.la) he can give you his additions.
Great talk!
I record the monthly presentations at the Inland Empire .Net Users Group. I’m half way done developing the distribution area for our groups website. This is taking a while because I have no free time! J/K, I’m also guilty of putting in the kitchen sink. I’m creating it so that users will have a single place for all session content including a Silverlight player for video, access to downloads such as slides and code as well as ratings and content. Will be nice, if I ever get it done!
Anyway, back to the topic. Is anyone interested in recorded sessions of Code Camp? I know I sure am. There are so many sessions by so many great speakers that it is impossible to see them all. Why not record them and make them available after the show?
I’ve volunteered to Lynn Langit and Daniel Egan, who I know have vested interest in Code Camp, to do the work. I just need funding for the resources. It’s not expensive, but it’s not trivial either. The setup I currently use for our IE .Net sessions is a VGA frame grabber from Epiphan (great equipment!), a wireless mic and my laptop. That’s it. Turns out when I went to the ESRI User Conference in San Diego they do the exact same thing, although they use Macs and a few mixers since they also have PA systems for the presenters. They sell their week’s worth of presentation recordings on DVD’s for ~$400. I’d like to make this content freely available for viewing on the web much like PDC.
This would be relatively easy. I could get a few bodies to help set up and keep things running smoothly.
Code Camp 2009 has at most 9 simultaneous sessions. Assuming this doesn’t grow I’d need to purchase and put together 9 recording “kits”. If we went the “inexpensive” route, without any vendors kicking in free or discounted gear, we could probably build a kit for a little less than $1,000. This would be for the frame grabber (VGA2USB model), a decent but inexpensive laptop, wireless mic and miscellaneous cabling gear. We’d get 5-10 frames per second at 1024×768, which for 95% of the presentations would be adequate. So, we’re looking at the need to finance ~$10k of equipment allowing for one spare. Any takers?
Well, this is definitely a blast. Getting a lot of great info and great contacts. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the Geek Dinner or any other after party. My niece is moving to North Carolina and tonight was her going away party. <sniff!> I guess that’s worth missing the Geek Dinner for.
Tomorrow’s another fun filled day!
