(Kirk Haselden) Microsoft has completely rewritten Data Transformation Services (DTS) in SQL Server 2005 for many reasons. In addition to streamlining DTS’s functionality and making it easier to use, the rewrite improves scalability and performance. In “What’s New In DTS?” (May 2004, InstantDoc ID 4

Time series calculations are frequently required in business and financial reports. Multidimensional expressions (MDX) provide the following time oriented functions to perform time series calculations: –YTD –QTD –MTD –WTD –LastPeriods –PeriodsToDate This article describes how to us

(William Pearson) In this article, we return to the subject of the previous article in the series, Mastering Time: Introduction to Moving Averages, and examine another approach for achieving “rolling average” aggregations. As we learned in our last article, “rolling,” or “moving,” averages, form

SQL Server 2000 enables replication of declared referential integrity (DRI) to Subscribers through the initial snapshot. The addition of this feature represents a significant performance enhancement for SQL Server 2000 as compared to other versions, but may cause unexpected results when the snapshot

(Bruce Szabo) SQLCentric is a piece of software that makes it easy to report on the status of the SQL servers in a domain. The company claim is that when SQL is the center of your universe you need SQLCentric. The company that makes the software is Pearl Knowledge Solutions. SQLCentric provides

(Larry Chesnut) I imagine there are not too many of you out there who have the where-with-all to test out SQL 2005 Beta 2’s clustering abilities on an 8 node cluster. This is a new feature available to SQL 2005 and only when using Windows 2003 Enterprise or Datacenter editions.

In some applications, it is useful to find the first or last dimension member that has data associated with it. This article illustrates how to use the HEAD(), TAIL(), and UNION() functions to return the first and last members of a dimension that have data. The article also illustrates the use of th

(Alexander Kozak) Not too long ago, one of our project managers asked me if there was a SQL Server function to return just the date–without the time portion. I knew the answer, of course, because of all the times I’ve coded T-SQL workarounds like this: SELECT sampleDate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(50), Da

(Srinivas Sampath) Before we begin the discovery of this new tool, there is one word that can immediately describe it: WOW!! That is the first reaction I had when I started playing around with DTS. Its a totally different beast in SQL Server 2005 and is a lot better than the SQL Server 2000 coun

(Marcin Policht) In our previous two articles of this series, we discussed auditing and security related aspects of SQL Server 2000 Data Transformation Services. Now, we will combine these topics by presenting DTS Meta Data Services, which provides the ability to audit creation, execution, and modif