Thursday, October 15, 2009

Restarting SSIS Packages without processing ALL the records over again

Here is a link to a little-known solution to a common problem.  Every time I have restarted a SQL SSIS package in the past that performs transformations on records, all the records get processed over again. 

This is a problem in a couple respects:
  • Processing time wasted
  • Code must check for records already processed
  • Additional time is spent maintaining that code and procesing
Here is the link:
Restarting SSIS Packages with Checkpoints

While this article uses SQL 2008 as an example, SQL 2005 also employes this same feature.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term business intelligence. He defined intelligence as:[1] "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."


In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed BI as an umbrella term to describe  [2]"concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems." 

It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.  More recently with the release of SQL 2005, the marketing department at Microsoft has trademarked the term with the introduction  of their "Business Intelligence" toolset.  Thus many believe BI to be something new on the scene.  Before the term "BI" gained popularity, terms such as Predictive Analytics, Decision Support Systems (DSS), and Executive Information Systems (EIS) covered earlier iterations of the same science.

[1] H. P. Luhn (October 1958). "A Business Intelligence System" (PDF). IBM Journal. http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/024/ibmrd0204H.pdf. Retrieved 2008-07-10.


[2] D. J. Power (2007-03-10). "A Brief History of Decision Support Systems, version 4.0". DSSResources.COM. http://dssresources.com/history/dsshistory.html. Retrieved 2008-07-10.