Test Exams

As well as blowing my own trumpet, there is also a point to this post about studying for these exams – and specifically using practice exams. This is a bit controversial – as evidenced by this recent thread in the MSDN SSIS Forums. Some exams are a brain dump – like Test King – and if you just want to learn the questions and answers, then that will serve you well, but your certification will be worthless once people find that you don’t actually know what you are talking about.

I’ve been using Transcender‘s exams to get me through 70-448 (and it’s 2005 predecessor) and found in useful because it helped me understand what kind of questions I’d be facing, but also where I needed to study. So rather than a rote learning exercise, I used them as a springboard to guide where I needed to study.

I’m not going to endorse Transcender particularly – I found myself having to correct far too manyof their questions where either the question was misleading, or the answer was simply wrong. To their credit they did actually respond to the issues I raised and corrected them, but it’s frustrating when you review your answers from a practice run and come to the realisation that the exam itself was wrong.

I’ve also found their customer service unacceptably slow – being a consultant I migrate laptops and o/s a lot and have burnt through my allotted product activations – I’ve had to request a manual activation code. I did this 4 days ago and am still waiting…

Also, the Exam Sucks – a bit

Some of the critiques levelled above at Transcender’s practice exam also apply to the real thing. Some of the questions and answers are vaguely worded or use terms that don’t match the product itself.

However my biggest bugbear is the scope of the exam. There’s quite a few questions on things that bear no relevance to the day to day experience of a BI Developer. I point heavily to the questions on SSRS Configuration files which in practice are rarely touched, or the emphasis on the use of Checkpoints in SSIS which most people avoid due to their poor implementation. But I guess this is true of many exams regardless of subject so is a bit forgivable.

Regardless, I still think certifications have their value – they force you to study areas you are less familiar with. It won’t make you proficient, but it will at least make you aware of capabilities. Experience, however, still trumps a bit of paper

It’s fairly standard stuff from my point of view – it’s metadata driven framework that consists of a single control package and a template execution package. I’ve aimed to include the following features, all of which can be turned on or off in the metadata without altering any code.

• Recoverability
• Extraction constraints
• Execution order
• Dependencies
• Failure handling

The SSIS packages are pretty much a simple interface for where the meat of the decision making is occurring – in a bundle of stored procedures where it’s a lot easier to write and maintain complex decisions about processing than in SSIS.

I’m adhering to my own self-set principles on usability as well, namely to hit these targets:

• High visibility of operation via reports
• Fully commented code
• No acronynms in table and field names
• Any codes used exposed in a metadata table

I will be doing a demo of it at the AUSSUG session in Sydney this coming Tuesday as part of the SSIS round table which is taking place:

James Beresford:  ETL Frameworks

Design and Implementation considerations when building ETL Control Frameworks, Including the debut demo of the BI Monkey ETL Framework

Kevin Wong:  Practical ADO. NET

Three practical showcases using ADO.NET in SSIS including re-usable in memory resultsets

Glyn Llewellyn:  Putting the T back into ETL

Looking at alternative ways in SSIS to perform data transformations and correction and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each method

(Full details at the AUSSUG website)

I hope to see you there!

Lunchtime Wed 3rd March, 2010 – Ensuring Optimal Performance in SQL Server 2008 Based Applications with Viktor Isakov

Evening * Thu * 4th Mar 2010 – What’s new in Reporting Services 2008 R2 and PerformancePoint Services 2010 with Peter Myers, presenting what’s new in the upcoming release of Reporting Services 2008 R2 and PerformancePoint Services 2010

And TBA date in April 2010 – Knights of the SSIS Round Table – Kevin Wong, Glyn Llewelyn and myself will be presenting a series of mini demos followed by Q&A, so a chance to pick some expert brains

Hope to catch you at one of the sessions!

A BI Monkey update

The BI Monkey has been a little short of access to computers for a while, as burglary took his laptop, being on holiday in Japan and Hong Kong distracted him and just to add some extra confusion into the mix, I switched consultancies towards someone a bit more Microsoft focused. However I am almost back in the saddle, having finally got SQL2008 up and running on 64-bit Windows 7. Once i’ve dealt with the vast amounts of admin that seem to accompany joining my new company, i’ll carry on with my quest to cover every component in depth. However I may end up delivering all my new samples on a 64-bit architecture – though i’m still looking at setting up a virtual PC to stick with 32-bit SQL2005 for creating my demo files.

None of this seems to have slowed down the growth of the site, though it is starting to calm down – bimonkey.com had it’s first 5,000 hit day earlier this month and will easily top 100,000 hits this month. This makes me very happy! Now, if only the Google ad revenue would come pouring in!

Windows 7 first impressions

My new work machine is loaded with Windows 7 Enterprise, and I have to say, i’m impressed. I wasn’t much of a Vista hater so perhaps I am an easier sell, but there are a few features that really stand out for me:

• Taskbar – the new smaller icons are nice and the way you can manage multiple windows from a single icon is very slick
• Libraries – Being able to collect several disparate folders under a single master folder makes managing files much easier
• Snap – a simple but easy way of pulling windows to cover half the screen for side by side review is handy
• Speech – I was a fan in Vista, and whilst not much has changed, it does seem better behaved – so will be dictating more in future

The introductory videos here are a great and easy introduction to these features, and I reccommend all new 7 users take a peek.

While shiny things often have sentimental value, it ultimately is just stuff, and stuff can be insured and replaced. However the laptops contained that most valuable of modern commodities – data, lots of it, most very personal. What had I done to protect it? Nothing. My very, very bad. My backup routines were flaky and none of the data was encrypted, so whilst I have changed every password I can think of my data on the machine is still vulnerable. Consequently I am at severe risk of ID Theft and can only hope that the people who end up with our laptops just wipe them and don’t try and use the data on there for malicious purposes.

I was slack because I thought our machines were safe at home and we lived in a safe neighbourhood, but like any assumption it was flawed. So if you own a laptop / pc on which you store data you don’t want falling into other people’s hands, I strongly advise you to do the following now.

1. Make sure your machine is password protected – even for screensavers. If you leave your machine idle when you aren’t at home, make sure it will lock itself if you forget to do it manually.
2. Encrypt your personal data – which is a built in feature of Xp/Vista/7 - and so simple i’m really kicking myself for not doing this
3. Backup your data – preferably on a discreetly located wireless NAS, which should come with software to make this a breeze. Maybe even use LiveMesh at a push.
4. Track your laptop – there are various bits of free and paid for software that will report its location, take snaps with the webcam and report it to a web server so you have some chance of recovery.

So now i’m down to outdated backups, lost data, and having to be wary about alot of my financial activities for a long, long time because of my carelessness. Allow me to be the lesson you learn from.

An Irked BI Monkey.

In another bit of good news, one of my posts has been linked to from the Integration Services page of the SQL Server Developer Center. It’s nice to be appreciated by the big guys – i’ve added a link to the page in the Links section.

Thanks to all who come by and I hope to hear from you soon in the comments – I always like to know what you like (or don’t like) about BI Monkey, and also to face a challenging problem every now and then!

Cheers, James (aka the BI Monkey)

I’m a happy BI Monkey as a result – now I just hope I can get some more comments and content requests – if you are a lurking BI Monkey follower please say hi in the comments and get stuck in to my other posts as well. Looking forward to getting your input!

James, aka the BI Monkey

I’ve also added links in the Relevant Blogs section for the SSIS Team Blog and for Jamie Thompson’s excellent SSIS Junkie, where I have found more solutions to SSIS problems that anywhere else on the net.

Following on from that I will be adding some posts on learning resources that I used for getting through my MCTS(BI) and also begin a component by component  guide to SSIS. This of course is dependent on my laptop ever staying out of the repair shop longer than a week at a time.

I hope my tiny readership continues to find the contents of this blog useful.