Author: Soheil Bakhshi

Business Intelligence - BI, SQL Server Integration Services - SSIS

Deploying SSIS Projects to Different Environments

In this post I’m explaining how you can deploy a developed SSIS project to several different environments. It might have happened to you that there are several environments that you need to deploy the SSIS projects to. Assume that you have DEV, QA, UAT and PROD environments. Some organisations might have even more environments. Also, there are many cases that you might have several PRODs that the SSIS packages should be deployed to all of them. So the scenario is that whenever you create a new SSIS project in DEV area or you may modify the existing projects, you need to deploy each SSIS project to QA for testing purposes. So, if you have 3 new SSIS projects or you’ve just modified 3 existing projects, you’ll need to deploy each project separately. It is the same story for QA guys after finishing the test cases and after the SSIS projects pass all the test cases. They’ll need to deploy all projects to UAT. Again it is the same story with UAT and PROD. It is getting harder when you need to deploy all the projects in several different PROD environments.

Using the solution below, you can easily deploy all SSIS projects from an environment to another environment or even several different environments.

Continue reading “Deploying SSIS Projects to Different Environments” →

Business Intelligence - BI, SQL Server Integration Services - SSIS

Operating on different source SQL Server instances in a single SSIS package

In some cases we need to do a single task for lots of SQL Server instances. Assume that we have a web based programme. The programme’s database is distributed across the country and we have 10 different virtual (VM) servers to host the programme’s databases. The programme is working based on some configurations that are stored in a CONFIG database. The CONFIG databases are hosted by 20 different SQL Server instances to serve 20 different clients. The SQL server instances are all named SQL server instances hosted by those 10 virtual servers. We need to update the CONFIG database for all regions on a monthly basis. The database structure of all CONFIG databases is the same. In this case a simple way is to create an SSIS package for each source server to collect the data from all source databases one-by-one. This means that we will have 10 copies of the same SSIS package that each package is pointing to a server as a source server. We need 10 packages because we can retrieve the CONFIG database list by writing a T-SQL script or using an extra Foreach Loop Container. So we need a SSIS package per server.

Tableau Data Sources, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Software

Publishing A Google Analytics Data Source Or A Workbook Linked To A Google Analytics Data Source into Tableau Server

We can create informative reports on our website analytics using Tableau. Tableau has the ability to connect to a Google Analytics data source. The problem is that if Tableau cannot pass the credentials to Google automatically, the following error message pops up.

image

“An error occurred when publishing the data source. GetOAuthUsername caught exception processing specs. Response code: 500”

So, how we can publish a Google Analytics data source into a Tableau sever? How we can publish created Tableau worksheets that are linked to a Google Analytics data source into the Tableau server? Why the above error message pops up and how we can resolve the problem? These and some more questions are going to be answered in the following post. But, first of all, how we can use Tableau to create reports based on Google Analytics data sources?

Continue reading “Publishing A Google Analytics Data Source Or A Workbook Linked To A Google Analytics Data Source into Tableau Server” →

SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services - SSIS, T-SQL

How to install database diagram support programmatically

In the previous article we discussed about how migrating a database diagram into another database. In this article I’ll quickly show you how to install database diagram support. As mentioned in the” How to copy or migrate database diagrams into another database” article, we need to install database diagram support to be able to see the migrated database diagrams. We also explained a very easy way to install database diagram support from SSMS in the “How to store a SQL Server database diagram into a file and share it with others?” article. Now, assume that we want to migrate the database diagrams into several SQL Server instances. It seems that it might be better if we can implement the whole process programmatically. This was exactly my question when I wanted to deploy several database diagrams from a database hosted in development environment into a copy of that database hosted by test or UAT (User Acceptance Test) environments. For instance, just assume that there are a bunch of database diagrams created by developers in development environment. So, you’ll have an exact copy of the database structure in test environment. Your testers need to use the database diagrams created by the developers. So far, so good. This part of the challenge is covered in the previous articles. However, we still need to install database diagram support manually and this is what we don’t like! The solution is really easy. Run the following code and you are done! You can also add the following code to the execute SQL task from your SSIS package if you decided to implement the solution in an SSIS package (take a look at “Migrating database diagram by creating a simple SSIS package” No. 8).

Continue reading “How to install database diagram support programmatically” →