Importing a .SAS7BDAT file into SQL Server Using SSIS

I was tasked with importing a .SAS7BDAT file into SQL Server the other day, and there were enough non-intuitive pieces to it that I thought I'd write down the steps while they still were fresh.

Some searching shows it's a problem with several solutions, but most of what shows up seems unnecessarily complicated, at least, for someone who's used to using Integration Services.  It turns out that there's a very easy method for accessing the data in one of these files, and it doesn't require a SAS client.  It does require a download from SAS, but that is freely available.

Scheduling a SQL Agent Job to Run on a Calculated Day that isn’t included in the Regular Scheduler Options

I’ve had a hard time coming up with a title for this post, because while the concept is easy to understand, it’s difficult to summarize.
We refresh one of our development instances on the first Monday of each month.  That’s an easy thing to schedule, as it’s an option within the SQL Agent scheduler:

We want to send a notification to the affected users beforehand, however, and since the refresh occurs in the wee hours of the morning, we can’t send out that alert on Monday.  It has to occur on the Friday before the first Monday. 
That, friends and neighbors, isn’t a built-in option.
It’s a little trickier (though in the end, not terrible) because the Friday before the first Monday could be in this month or in next month.

Pasting Code to OneNote 2010 with Formatting and Colors

[Update 1/2915]
Head over here for a solution for OneNote 2013.  Annoying, but it works!

I use OneNote as a SQL script repository, and in most respects it’s a great solution:  it’s searchable, the notebooks make organizing easy, and its integration with SharePoint (and SkyDrive) is pretty good. There’s one problem, though, that has made it less than ideal:  color formatting doesn’t come through from SSMS. Notepad++ is my go-to editor for long scripts (if you’ve not used it, you should check it out), and it has what ought to be a perfect combination of plug-ins for the job:

• First is the excellent Poor Mans’ T-Sql Formatter.  This is a first-rate SQL formatter that integrates with SSMS and Notepad++.
• Second is NppExport (included with NPP), which allows you to copy the selected text to the clipboard as HTML.  Unfortunately, OneNote doesn’t really handle HTML (even!) very gracefully:  NppExport html is rendered by OneNote without any line breaks.  It should be noted that this appears to be a limitation in the rendering that OneNot does, not in the HTML generated by NppExport.

Rant aside, please allow me to say that *this should work!*  I’ve been on a crusade to figure out how to paste my code from SSMS to OneNote while retaining the color formatting, and it’s taken awhile to find a good solution. After a lot of searching, I ran across NoteHighlight on CodePlex.  The instructions (and the installer) are written in Chinese, so the hyperlink here is to the Google Translation link to that page.  I have this to say about it:  It. Works. Well. In OneNote 2010.  If you're using ON 2007 or (like me, now) ON 2013, I'm afraid there's still not a good option.

Here’s what my code looked like when pasting formatted SQL from NppExport:
 

I'm guessing, by the way, that this is a result of NPPExport using the White-space:pre tag in the exported HTML (css, really).  It would appear that ON doesn't do full HTML.  See this connect item for an upvote on fixing that.

Update:  Microsoft has removed Connect options for OneNote, so there's no longer a good way to submit or track bugs.


Here is the same SQL when pasted from NoteHighlight:
Better, huh?  Note that the colors aren’t the same:  NoteHighlight actually does some parsing of the code and does its own coloring.  You can choose from a variety of syntax color schemes.

Update 8/26/12:  Bad news for folks using ON 2007:  this only appears to work with OneNote 2010.  Thanks to +Edelman for pointing that out.  The NoteHighlight page on Codeplex appears to be pretty static, too, so I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for feature requests and the like.

SSIS and MSDB Packages in a Clustered Environment

There seems to be a lot of confusion about SSIS administration in a clustered environment, and I think a lot of it comes down to SQL error messages that occur in a variety of situations.

Take the following, when browsing the MSDB stored package folder when connected to an SSIS instance:

The SQL Server instance specified in SSIS service configuration is not present or is not available. This might occur when there is no default instance of SQL Server on the computer. For more information, see the topic "Configuring the Integration Services Service" in Server 2008 Books Online.

Login timeout expired
A network-related or instance-specific error has occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. Server is not found or not accessible. Check if instance name is correct and if SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. For more information see SQL Server Books Online.
Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [2].  (MsDtsSrvr)

Login timeout expired
A network-related or instance-specific error has occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. Server is not found or not accessible. Check if instance name is correct and if SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. For more information see SQL Server Books Online.Named Pipes Provider: Could not open a connection to SQL Server [2].  (Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 10.0)

SQL Agent job to query multiple SQL Server Instances

SSMS provides a nice way to query many SQL Server instances at one time using the Central Management Server (CMS) functionality.  You can right-click on a server registration group and query all of the servers in that that group.  Very handy.  Unfortunately, there isn't anything that simple built in to the SQL Agent engine, so we have to use something else.  Here we'll use powershell to run a series of queries against a CMS group of servers to collect a list of databases and save that list in a central location.