Have you ever been tasked with a project that you know has been done before, probably thousands of times, but you didn’t know where to start because it was new to you? If you’re nodding your head yes, you’re not alone. The fact is, we all have.
Almost two years ago, Andy Leonard invited me to be part of a book project. He had a vision of compiling a “recipe book” of common tasks that nearly every ETL professional encounters at some point in his or her career. Whereas most technical books explain how to use the product or specific features, Andy wanted to create a pattern-oriented book that would help jumpstart an SSIS project.
With some trepidation, I humbly agreed to join the outstanding group of authors Andy had assembled:
- Andy Leonard (Blog | Twitter)
- Matt Masson (Blog| Twitter)
- Tim Mitchell (Blog | Twitter)
- Jessica Moss (Blog | Twitter)
I was excited about this project for three reasons. First, the incredible list of authors. These are the folks that I have learned SSIS from! To be included amongst their ranks is a deep honor for me. Secondly, I couldn’t keep track of the number of times such a book would have been useful to me throughout my own career. I sincerely hope that this book can save people some of the headaches that I myself have experienced. Lastly, having a book published has been on my bucket list since before I knew about bucket lists. Now I can cross that off and focus on traveling to outer space. 😉
The book is aptly titled “SQL Server 2012 Integration Services Design Patterns” and is out today. My contributions are the Metadata Collection and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) chapters. You can purchase the book at Amazon or directly from Apress.
The whole gang and I will be presenting a precon at PASS Summit 2012 that will explore SSIS Design Patterns in detail. I will write another blog post once I have decided on the particulars of what I’ll be presenting on. In the meantime, suffice it to say if you work with or around SSIS, this will be a precon you won’t want to miss.
One last thing. I didn’t have much space for acknowledgements in the book, so I want to take the opportunity here to express my gratitude to the following individuals. In no particular order, I’d like to thank:
- Andy, Matt, Tim, and Jessica – for allowing me the privilege of writing alongside you
- John Hoang – for your invaluable contributions to the PDW chapter
- Brian Davis – for being such a great technical editor
- Cindy Bradley – for giving me the opportunity to work on the POC and for always providing me with interesting and challenging work 😉
- Jeff Moberley – for being such a great mentor & for challenging me to “think outside the box”
- Marie Bayer – for being so willing to help whenever I have SSIS questions
- Murshed Zaman, Martin Lee, Ted Tasker, Brian Walker, Jesse Fountain, & Bruce Campbell – without your assistance, there would not have been a PDW chapter in the first place
- Chris Leonard, Jimmy May, and Brent Ozar – for encouraging me to get involved in the SQL Server community; without you guys, I would not have had this opportunity
- Aaron Bertrand – for creating sp_foreachdb, which I use ridiculously often
- Mark Powers, Jonathan Gennick, and the rest of the wonderful Apress crew – for putting this book together
My apologies to anyone I may have missed.