Sunday, October 12, 2008

Abstracting underlying data sources for SSIS packages using Views

In a perfect world, we'd never have changes to the schema once it has been defined. But in practice this is almost never the case.

I stumbled upon this excellent article which provides a solution to minimize the effects of change.

http://bi-polar23.blogspot.com/2008/09/views-as-for-ssis.html

Retrieving SQL Server 2005 Product Version

Here’s the query used to retrieve the SQL Server Production Version information.

Pretty useful when diagnosing problems in multiple environments.

SELECT  SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

Storm, replacement for the aging WebServiceStudio

I am frequently required to work with 3rd party Web Services. These web services are often underdevelopment as well and more often than not tend to break our applications after each update.

I’ve been using WebServiceStudio for a while now to diagnose problems that arise after each update. WebServiceStudio was available on GotDotNet until it got shutdown and haven’t seen much updates since.

Luckily there’s a new open source tool that I discovered that replaces this aging application; Storm.

Here’s a description taken from the project site:

STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services.

It is written mostly in F#. (I love this language!)

STORM allows you to

  1. Test web services written using any technology (.NET , Java, etc.)
  2. Dynamically invoke web service methods even those that have input parameters of complex data types
  3. Save development time and money. Creating throw-away test client apps just to test the web service is just too wasteful
  4. Test multiple web services from within one UI.
  5. Edit/Manipulate the raw soap requests.
  6. Others (Try out the tool and find out yourself!)

 http://www.codeplex.com/storm