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... The post Reflections on My First-Ever Presentation, Fifteen Years Later appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

At the PASS Summit a few weeks ago, I had a great chat with some folks about our home office setups. More and more of us are working from home these days, giving us the freedom to customize our workspace to suit our individual wants. Office Setups Past Over the decade that I’ve been working from home, my home office... The post My Office Setup appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

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... The post Creating a Generic SSRS Report appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

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... The post What Stephen King Taught Me About Data Storytelling appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

Let’s talk about your development environment. Specifically, I’d like to chat with you about the virtual space where your data architecture team, software developers, and information curators do their development and testing work. A proper development environment is logically separated from the production environment, and is often further partitioned into different realms for initial development, data or functional validation, and... The post Let’s Talk About Your Development Environment appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

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... The post Moving On From PASS. What’s Next? appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

SharePoint lists are popular and simple tools for storing modestly-sized discrete sets of data. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) includes a source component to allow reading data from SharePoint lists. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to use SSIS to read from a SharePoint list using the OData source. SharePoint lists A SharePoint list is a simple collection of related... The post Connecting to SharePoint Lists with SSIS appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

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... The post ETL Antipattern: Ignoring the “Why?” appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

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... The post ETL Antipattern: Ignore the Logging appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more

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... The post ETL Antipattern: Skipping The Documentation appeared first on Tim Mitchell ..read more