Jessica M. Moss

On June 8-12, I'll be attending and speaking for the DevTeach/SQLTeach Vancouver conference . I've written about SQLTeach before, and I have to say that it's one of my favorite conferences. It's a small group of attendees with speakers who are some of the biggest names in the field. You really get a great opportunity to learn from and hobnob with speakers such as Peter DeBetta, Bill Graziano, Kevin Kline, Joe Webb, and more! I know I'm looking forward to picking their brains on a few things. A few highlights of the conference: Monday night: Party with Vancouver IT community DevTeach Kickoff party Weekend after: Alt.NET event - DevTeach attendees receive a special registration code Preconferences: 3 preconferences on Silverlight, F#, and Agile Development Keynote: Tim Huckaby will discuss "Your Development Happy Place" Register soon to get a great deal - the conference is right around the corner. I look forward to seeing you there!

In an ideal world, the source system of your data warehouse has the exact information that you need to populate all of the fields in your dimensions.  In a less than ideal world (also known as the real world), we need to cobble pieces of data together.  You may come across one scenario where all of your dimension and fact information is in one large table.  How do we handle this ETL in SQL Server Integration Services? It is possible to load new records into your dimensions while loading your fact.  One way would be to use a Lookup transformation to check for existence, and if the business key doesn't yet exist, insert that value, return the surrogate key, and go along your merry way.  On the other hand, if you need to use those dimensions for other fact tables, you may decide to load only your dimensions first. To load all dimensions from one table, we can utilize the Aggregate transformation in SSIS, which provides the capability to perform aggregations on columns in your data