I totally agree, Grant.

I'm looking at introducing "software engineering" as a topic to discuss at work with the data engineers, and introduce them to all of those concepts like encapsulation,...

I can remember the "revolution" that were things like RPG, Oracle CASE, et cetera, all of which were tools that wrote code for the developer. Much of the time we...

• This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by  Bruce W Cassidy.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by  Bruce W Cassidy.

There are a few conditions under which that type of merge fails, including when relational integrity is in place. Relational integrity is usually regarded as a "best practice" for data...

Another way to deal with this issue is by using sequences to pre-load the key values (instead of using identity). You can create a default on the surrogate key...

If any of your transactions reference a date prior to the effective date on the dimension, this could get somewhat confusing.

For an initial load, I generally use a "placeholder" date...

Some good answers in there. I agree that an ODS is often a part of a data warehouse, which also contains other components like master data repositories, data marts,...

If you are creating a lot of them, you might want to check out BIML:

http://bimlscript.com/

It takes a wee while to learn how to drive it, but once you...

I can recommend Jeff Moden's excellent article (and code) here:

Tally OH! An Improved SQL 8K “CSV Splitter” Function[/url]

I should add:

Using the splitter function will convert a string in the form:

A,B,C

to...

Jeff Moden (1/21/2014)

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[...]But why INT. For a calendar table, SMALLDATETIME would work just fine in a pre-2008 environment and certainly one of the newer DATE datatypes would work without...

There's one issue with using the EXCEPT approach as the data source for a subsequent MERGE: it becomes impossible to tell from within the MERGE if rows have been deleted...

Herman van Midden (8/20/2013)

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[...]I borrowed some useful dimensional design principles to efficiently implement transaction history.

I hope you like my solution, although its theoretically maybe not correct, even if Invoices are...

Dimensional modelling was something invented by Ralph Kimball (although I'm sure Margy Ross had a great deal of input as well). They came up with the naming standards for...

I think format() is part of the .Net stack, and it wouldn't surprise me if there is an overhead to calling out to .Net functions rather than using native SQL...

Thank...

Some interesting additional reading here: http://bimlscript.com/