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Author: Kevin Feasel

Trouble Installing CTP 2.5: msoledbsql.msi and msodbcsql.msi

Published 2019-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky spent a lot of time troubleshooting a pernicious issue with SQL Server CTP 2.5 installation:

The other day, I was <sarcasm>blessed / honored / delighted</sarcasm> to waste several hours attempting to install SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.5 over and over again. Each time it would get through the first several steps of the installation process, but then encounter some condition causing it to rollback and finally end with the <sarcasm>super helpful</sarcasm> error message of:

An error occurred for a dependency of the feature causing the setup process for the feature to fail.
 
Use the following information to resolve the error, and then try the setup process again.

That might have been ok had there actually been any information that followed. But no, there was none, not even a small piece of unhelpful information.

Solomon takes us through the blow-by-blow accounting as well as a quick rundown of the solution.

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SSIS 2019 Preview Released

Published 2019-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck notes something very nice:

It is not a joke: SSIS is available for Visual Studio 2019 as a preview. Whoa, hold on. SQL Server 2019 hasn’t been released yet? But there’s already an SSIS 2019? Didn’t we have to wait months after the release of SQL Server 2017 before we had an SSIS version for Visual Studio 2017?

Yes, we did, you can read all about there here.

But times have changed apparently. The SSIS team caught up with the rest of the BI tools: SSIS projects are now available from the Visual Studio market place.

Read on to see what this means for SQL Server Data Tools.

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A Primer on RoboCopy

Published 2019-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse takes us through a venerable file copying tool for Windows:

Robocopy has been around for years within the Microsoft eco-system and it is highly versatile.  However, until recently, it wasn’t a tool that I was versed at and frankly, hardly used it.  Over the past year or so, however, I have found myself using it more and more as a solution to for file movement when needed.

Essentially, robocopy will move files or even directories from one location to another.  It will copy permissions without any additional coding, and it will only copy the files that do not exist within the destination.  This is useful in that you do not have to explicitly account for files that might already exist at the destination.  It handles it for you.

Read on to see more, as well as a demo of RoboCopy in action.

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Microsoft R Open 3.5.2 and 3.5.3

Published 2019-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

David Smith announces Microsoft R Open 3.5.2 and reveals when 3.5.3 comes out:

It’s taken a little bit longer than usual, but Microsoft R Open 3.5.2 (MRO) is now available for download for Windows and Linux. This update is based on R 3.5.2, and accordingly fixes a few minor bugs compared to MRO 3.5.1. The main change you will note is that new CRAN packages released since R 3.5.1 can now be used with this version of MRO.

David also lets us know that they’re working on 3.6.0’s release.

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Exploratory Data Analysis on Categorical Variables

Published 2019-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Giorgio Garziano continues digging into earthquake data:

To understand relationship or dependencies among categorical variables, we take advantage of various types of tables and graphical methods. Also stratifying variables can be encompassed in order to highlight if the relationship between two primary variables is the same or different for all levels of the stratifying variable under consideration.

The contingency table are said to be of one-way flavor when involving just one categorical variable. They are said two-way when involving two categorical variables, and so on (N-way).

Read on for various techniques for data analysis against categorical variables.

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Problems Distributed Systems Experience

Published 2019-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

RJ Zaworski gives us examples of the types of problems you can run into with distributed systems:

Time limits: ending the neverending
Here’s one to ponder: how long can a long-running action go on before the customer (even a very patient, very digital customer) loses all interest in the outcome?
Pull up a chair. With no upper bound, we could be here a while.

Read on for more in that vein with JavaScript-y solutions.

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Deploying SSIS Packages with Powershell

Published 2019-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson shows us how we can deploy an Integration Services ISPAC into the SSIS catalog with Powershell:

In my last post, I showed how you can use the SSIS PowerShell Provider to execute an SSIS package with PowerShell.  Of course, in order to execute that SSIS package, it has to get deployed first.  In Part 5 of Andy Leonard’s “SSIS, Docker, and Windows Containers” series he used some PowerShell code from Matt Masson’s blog post to deploy an .ISPAC file to the SSIS catalog.

Click through for the code.

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Figuring Out SSIS Memory Requirements

Published 2019-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Tim Mitchell tries to give us a better answer for SSIS memory requirements than “all of it and then some”:

When planning for memory needs, it is critical to understand how SQL Server Integration Services uses memory. SSIS will allocate memory from the unallocated system memory for each package executed, and surrenders that memory shortly after the package completes its execution. The memory allocated for SSIS package executions runs in the SSIS execution runtime process (ISServerExec.exe, if you are executing the package from the SSIS catalog).

Here’s where the package design has a significant impact on memory use. If a package uses an SSIS data flow, all of the data passing through that data flow is written to memory used by SSIS. For example, consider a package that loads 10 million rows from a flat file to a table. In this case, all 10 million rows will pass through the SSIS memory space during package execution.

Read on as Tim goes into good detail on the topic.

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