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T-SQL Tuesday #179 Roundup: The Data Detective Toolkit - Tim Mitchell
Earlier this month, I hosted the monthly T-SQL Tuesday invitation in which I asked, “What’s in your data detective toolkit?” We got some great responses which I’ll recap here, and I’ll share a few thoughts of my own at the end. First up, Rob Farley shared his approach, which focuses on the bigger picture of the business use of the...
T-SQL Tuesday #179: What's In Your Data Detective Toolkit? - Tim Mitchell
Most of us who work with data have, at least a few times, been presented with a challenge to explore and attempt to make sense of a poorly-defined set of data. Often it’s a collection of text files or Excel documents without any context or documentation. In other cases, it’s a database with no data map or metadata to help...
Reflections on My First-Ever Presentation, Fifteen Years Later - Tim Mitchell
May 3rd represents a small but significant milestone in my career. It was 15 years ago today, on May 3, 2008, when I delivered my first public technical presentation. That event, as brief as it was, helped to set in motion a chain of events that I could never have predicted. In 2008, I was working in healthcare, and had...
ETL Antipattern: Ignore the Logging - Tim Mitchell
In my last ETL Antipatterns post, I wrote about the unexciting but very necessary work of documenting ETL processes. The logging of ETL operations is just as (un)captivating as documentation, but is equally as important in the support of data movement and transformation processes. In this post, I’ll discuss a common misstep in ETL process management: ignoring the logs. What...
ETL Antipattern: Skipping The Documentation - Tim Mitchell
Documentation is an asset that is both loathed and loved. Creating technical and business documentation is often looked upon as a tedious chore, something that really ought to be done for every project but is often an easy candidate to push until later (or skip entirely). On the other hand, good documentation – particularly around data movement and ETL processes...
Moving On From PASS. What's Next? - Tim Mitchell
The COVID-19 global pandemic was by far the biggest influencer of 2020. This virus has cost over 1.8 million lives worldwide, and has upended normal life and commerce for most everyone. Many thousands of businesses were forced to close, costing millions of jobs. For those of us in the data community, we learned of one additional business casualty just before...
Creating a Generic SSRS Report - Tim Mitchell
Creating useful reports is part art and part science. On one end of the spectrum, you have visually appealing and highly customized reports and dashboards that are truly works of art. These often illicit “oohs” and “aahs” at first glance, and can help to creatively tell the story of the underlying data. On the other end of the spectrum is...
What Stephen King Taught Me About Data Storytelling - Tim Mitchell
I’ve been a fan of macabre fiction writer Stephen King since I first picked up The Dark Half sometime in the early 1990s. Since then I’ve read dozens of his books, and I’ve never been disappointed by a single one. However, when I finally got around to reading the two-decades-old book On Writing, I found not only some incredibly helpful...
Returning to PASS Summit - Tim Mitchell
In just a couple of weeks, the PASS Summit will return to Seattle, Washington. This one will be extra special, since it’s going to be the first in-person Summit in three years. When COVID upended normal life back in March of 2020, it also had a huge impact on in-person events. That year, the PASS Summit was changed from in-person...
ETL Antipattern: Load Processes that Don't Scale - Tim Mitchell
One of the most significant design considerations in ETL process development is the volume of data to be processed. Most ETL processes have time constraints that require them to complete their load operations within a given window, and the time required to process data will often dictate the design of the load. One of the more common mistakes I’ve seen...
ETL Antipattern: Ignoring the "Why?" - Tim Mitchell
In this final post in my ETL Antipatterns series, I’ll talk about a common big-picture mistake when building ETL processes: ignoring the fundamental question, “why are we doing this?” ETL Antipattern: ignoring the “why?” When I first began my consulting career more than ten years ago, most of my work was transactional. I’d be assigned to a project and would...