Our Development, Test, and Production SQL servers are 100% virtual. There are a few personal development/sandbox servers that are physical, but not many.

I'm ostensibly right in the middle of my career. I spent the past 8 years at what I hoped would be the place that I would work until I retired,...

Thanks! And I agree that even tracking a few data points on a consistent basis can be tough....

In addition to detailed financial tracking going back to 1997, I also track steps walked, my weight, every meal eaten, and while I was quitting smoking, I tracked my daily...

For the past 14 years, I have worked exclusively in the health care field, whether pharmaceuticals, public health, or health information exchange. I have turned down more lucrative offers...

I agree with this observation. I have seen some pretty terrible performance-killing dynamic SQL statements generated by applications that access databases. One aspect that I feel is often...

Glad to hear that it worked. Excel can be a slippery beast. Whenever I'm asked to use it as a data source, I see if it is feasible...

This is a stumper. It's a long shot, but is there any chance that there may be unprintable characters preceding the string?

To be sure, you could try something...

The substring syntax that you are using looks correct to me. What result are you actually getting instead of the expected one?

One tool that I use extensively in my ETL development is "V", a file viewer (http://www.fileviewer.com/) by Charles Prineas. It has the capability to view (but not...

I've only read 2 of the books on the list, but I've read other books by several of the authors.

Currently, I'm deep into The Exegesis of Philip K....

I'm very fortunate to work for a company that understands that in many cases, the absolute last thing a skilled senior technologist wants is to be promoted into management. ...

I started out as a GIS mapper, and then switched over to programming and database work at the same company due to a shortage of programmers there. Since then,...

Here is an MSDN article page on SSIS data types that may help you get started. It lists SQL Server, Oracle, Jet, and DB2 equivalent types.

I had a project which required getting a lot of data out of Oracle into SQL Server via SSIS. I investigated using the Oracle OLE DB connector, but I...