On November 4, 2009, Alberto and I had dinner with many other Analysis Services experts from all around the world, including many people from the Microsoft development team. We were in Seattle for the PASS Summit 2009, a conference for SQL Server professionals, and because Redmond, Washington is very near to Seattle, events like this often...

In January 1999, I was preparing to teach an introductory programming class in Java. I had taught it three times and I was getting frustrated. The failure rate in the class was too high, and, even for students who succeeded, the overall level of achievement was too low.

One of the problems I saw was the books. I had tried...

A gadget freak I am not—let’s be clear about that from the outset—but in the past couple of weeks our postman (a.k.a. the mailman) has arrived not once, but twice, with a package containing one of the most ingeniously compact bundles of consumer technology that exists today. The first was a long-overdue necessity: a...

THE MOST IMPORTANT BUSINESS intelligence tool in the Microsoft Swiss Army knife of tools is SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). This is because the other tools would be nothing without the cleansing and movement of data into a presentable format. The product can extract, transform, and load (ETL) data astonishingly fast. A 2010 benchmark...