Folders provide a single faceted, single point of failure that has limited users and caused inefficiency and risk across Enterprises for years. This is largely due to the nature of a folder. It provides a single source of storage with security options, but once you start nesting folders it creates a single path that may be forgotten or corrupted by improper naming or governance failings. Many organizations complain that their file shares are out of control, and while they may have begun with the best of intentions, the intended use was either not clearly identified or sustained and the end result looks something like the following. How will an organization know where their “real” content is located? 

An even better question is “What makes folders and file shares evil?” Key factors behind “Folder Fail” are as follows:

While describing LogiXML’s Logi Info, Brian Cox stated “there is still room for improvement on the development end of things.”  If LogiXML is listening or if my developer peers wish to understand some of the risks, I will describe a few challenges I experienced.

Logi Info Studio is the developers’ tool for creating LogiXML's Logi Info reports.  Since I am working with Logi Info Studio on one project and Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) (i.e., the developers’ tool for creating SQL Server Reporting Services reports) on another project, comparing the two products is natural for me.  Examples and descriptions from each developer interface are included.

Element Name Proofing
Consider this simple query using the SQL Server AdventureWorks2008R2 database.

BI on SharePoint

Getting reports onto SharePoint is an important step in centralizing knowledge and increasing awareness of a company's available Business Intelligence. Unfortunately, people shy away from taking this step because it seems like something that would require a lot of time, effort and expense. This two part series will illustrate the process of putting BI on SharePoint, remove some of the mystery around it and hopefully encourage further investigation.  Part one will cover the setup and part two will illustrate working with SSRS reports within SharePoint.

Picking up where we left off in the Service Bus Introduction, this post will walk through a Relayed Messaging sample in order to highlight how the AppFabric Service Bus could be utilized to build Hybrid applications.  In addition to the basic sample, I will also demonstrate how to provision a BizTalk Server 2010 Receive Location on the Service Bus.

Before I publish the next post on Relayed Messaging, I thought I would take this opportunity to share some lessons learned yesterday about the AppFabric Service Bus billing.  While I was preparing to present on the Azure Service Bus at some recent Code Camps, I decided to create a different Service Bus namespace for every session in an effort to tailor the code to the audience.  I selected the pack of 5 connections for each of the namespaces rationalizing that I would not go over 5 concurrent connections at any point during any of my demos.  The scenario I did not completely think through was that by provisioning the namespaces a few days in advance of my sessions and running several tests to ensure I was hitting the right namespace, the cycles had a much larger impact on my overall monthly allowance than I expected. 

I recently had the honor of delivering a presentation entitled "Build Hybrid Applications Using the Azure AppFabric Service Bus" at the Richmond and Philly.NET Code Camps.  Virtually no one in either of the sessions had any previous experience with Windows Azure or the components of the AppFabric.  In this series of blog posts, I will expand upon the presentation in an effort to introduce the AppFabric and take a deeper dive into the code and practical application of the Service Bus messaging patterns.

On Saturday, November 5, 2011, SQL Saturday #96 will take place in Chevy Chase, MD. SQL Saturdays are free, all-day training events geared for professionals who use Microsoft’s SQL Server. SQL Saturdays occur all over the world. Each event is split into many sessions with topics ranging from technical tricks to professional tips, best practices to upcoming features. The most amazing part of any SQL Saturday is the organizers and presenters are all volunteers.

People in the business community often question the value of professional certifications. Is the cost of passing an exam worth it? Some people say yes. Some people say no. Some people qualify their position by suggesting a certification is only worthwhile if an individual lacks sufficient experience in his or her field.

As someone who owns a couple of certifications, I admit my bias toward seeing value in achieving them. With that bias in mind, allow me to explain my rationale for the value of professional certifications. I purposely use the general term “professional certifications” to include certifications for technologies, methodologies and the like because I suspect my rationale applies equally to all.

Recently, while working with T-SQL's merge statement and its output clause I ran across an error I couldn't track down.  My statement looked something like this:

Merge #target_1 as target using 
(select value1 from #source ) as source 
on target.value1 = source.value1 
when not matched then insert (value1) values (value1) 
OUTPUT $action, inserted.* into #action_target;

The code was producing this error

Msg 213, Level 16, State 1, Line 25
Column name or number of supplied values does not match table definition.

Earlier this week I participated in a discussion thread on LinkedIn regarding the usage of the WCF SQL Adapter in BizTalk Server and I wanted to summarize some of my thoughts and the recommended best practices regarding this particular scenario.

Basic Requirement

Using the WCF SQL Adapter in BizTalk, we need to issue a select statement against multiple tables in SQL Server through the use of INNER JOINs.