For the last couple of days, I've been working on an application that manages our office employee swipe card system. The data of the various swipes that an employee makes during the course of a day is stored in an Access database and this needs to be analyzed. I used SQL Integration Servies (SSIS) to extract and transform the data and in this process, I learned about some cool transformations in SSIS like Merge and applying Type Casts in expressions. However, the cool thing that I liked was the ability to have a DataReader (in memory dataset) as the destination of a transformation. All the computation that I did on the swipe data is written into this DataReader and the good thing is that I can access this data reader from a SQL Reporting Services (SRS) report giving me true integration!!
To enable SRS to work with SSIS, you need to do some settings (which I will outline in an article on my web site), but once done, it works great. I did face some challenges in sending paramters to the SSIS package from the SRS report, but I finally managed to solve it and the end result looks good and I'm really pleased. The performance is also really good and does not give the sense that so many moving parts are coming together.
Been very busy for the past few months. Right now, am in Redmond attending the Platform Strategy Review meeting for CTOs and Senior Executives. The sessions are quite interesting as Microsoft discusses their roadmap. Cannot divulge more as most of the material is under NDA.
This is one of the most hectic trips that I've had. I've travelled for 26 hours from India and am just getting used to the time zone problem, and am leaving back to India in the next 2 days. So for a 2 day conference, I've travelled for 4 days :-). One solace has been an great Indian restaurant that I found near my hotel on NE 12th street. Its a place called Chutney and its food is really good.