Yes, you are right, built-in sp_getapplock could be used in my solution instead of the user-defined semaphore table drop_fi_semaphore

, but the structure of the SSIS package would remain...

The DDL for the view is at :

In the article is written :

This script requires the creation of the big view in

To convert fast from INT to HEX :

right(master.dbo.fn_varbintohexstr(cast( Disconnection_cause as INT) ),2)

Bruce,

writing the same code I wrote using MERGE statement is not very easy , I am not sure if it is possible, and I wanted to provide...

A faster way to convert Hex to Dec is

select CAST(CONVERT(VARBINARY, 'FF00FF', 2) AS INT)

The string to convert must be at least 2 chars long :

select CAST(CONVERT(VARBINARY, 'F', 2)...

2 mld = 2billions .. it is very close to the max value for a T-SQL int

By the way, this dimension is Type 6 ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_changing_dimension#Pure_Type_6_Implementation

Yes, you are right, this is not the best for disk space and performance, but recalculation of fact tables is much easier and often not necessary if there are some...

Benefit is a more loosely coupling between dimension and fact table .

It mays save up from need of recalculating the fact table if something go wrong, because the fact table...

Alexander , you are right : in my script is missing the Primary Key definition for the dimension .

The primary key will be on Surrogate_Key, Date_From .

This is not...

Josh Ashwood (8/9/2011)

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Nice article, and definitely on topic for real database developers...

However the more relevant question we are often faced with is what performs better - table variables, temp...

Nice script !!!

I suggest a small improving,

special handling not only of text datatype

but also of ntext

when 'ntext' then 'cast([' + column_name + '] as nvarchar(max))'

You...

Is possible to rebuild an heap simply by using :

alter table tt rebuild partition=all(x) ,

avalaible in Sqlserver 2008, online operation.

In SqlServer2005 is possible to use my script ,...

Reorganize is online , but sometime is necessary to rebuild an index, and rebuilding a given partition of a given index cannot be done online.

You could always rebuild online...