Jessica M. Moss

Data science and data scientists are all the rage right now in the information technology space. Every company wants one; every job candidate touts they are one. But what actually does that mean to companies and potential employees? I decided to take a course on data science to see if I could find out! My co-worker, Gabriella Melki, recommended the Coursera Data Science specialization by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The entire specialization contains a set of 9 courses, but you can take each one individually. I started with the first course, called "The Data Scientist's Toolbox". Over the four week timeframe, I was able to view lectures and perform the assignments at my own pace. I've listed below my thoughts on the course and what I learned about data science. Week 1: Introduction to Data Science Data science is about data , specifically about answering questions, and science , following a method to discover an answer. A data scientist is the ...

Power BI ( https://powerbi.microsoft.com ) is Microsoft’s tool that provides fast analysis and reporting to developers and business users.  Microsoft releases features on a monthly basis to this tool, so this post may be out of date before it’s even published!  One of the more recent releases includes the ability to create and publish custom visualizations for use by others. Power BI Visuals Gallery The Power BI Visuals Gallery is where you can publish, search, and download custom visuals for use in Power BI Desktop and the Power BI website.  People in the community and Microsoft have published visualizations that enhance the dashboard experience and still interact with the other visualizations as though they came from out-of-the-box! (On a side note, do we need to stop saying out-of-the-box now that everything is cloud-first…)  The types of visuals run the gamit from charts, graphs, animations, and slicers. Searching for a Custom Visual To start, go to the Pow...

Last week the SQL PASS organization held the annual PASS Summit in Seattle, Washington.  The PASS Summit is a week-long conference that brings thousands of SQL Server, Business Intelligence, and Business Analyst professionals together to learn all about best practices in use today and about new features coming in the next version.  I was able to attend by volunteering to help with PASS and by the good graces of my company and had an amazing week!  Many thanks go to all of the organizers, speakers, volunteers, and sponsors who put on another great event. The conference has two full-day preconference sessions on Monday and Tuesday which can be purchased in addition to the conference.  These trainings are amazing and definitely worth your while if you want more training.  I ended up flying out on Tuesday to start with the main conference on Wednesday.  On Tuesday, I explored Seattle a bit, and even visited the space needle (my first time in all my year...

I fully profess to know little to nothing about SharePoint, but I occasionally get pulled into setting up little sites or adding web parts for some of my reporting and business intelligence work.  Each time, I have to relearn the start-up steps to create what is needed!  So I decided to record a few of my go-to places so I can remember next time.  I used SharePoint 2010 to document the below steps, but the directions may be applicable to other versions.  Also, these steps assume you have full control of your site. Getting Started The first step is start editing the page rather than looking at it like an end user.  Do this by: Select the Page tab at the top of the screen Click the Edit Page button/drop down list Select the Edit Page option PS. When you're done, do these same steps, except select the "Stop Editing" button. Content Creation You may need to create a document library, a list, or another type of container.  I ...

At this point, you understand the options for moving an SSIS framework to the latest version of SSIS, and you've upgraded the logging portion of the framework using a hybrid approach.  The final step in the framework upgrade is handling your configurations.  Let's walk through an existing configuration implementation and how you can upgrade it by combining your existing implementation with the standard SSIS framework. Overview A typical "old-school" configuration scheme is described in the SSIS PDS book or in this blog post here: http://jessicammoss.blogspot.com/2008/05/ssis-configuration-to-configuration-to.html .  Starting in SSIS 2012, the configuration scheme uses environments and parameters when using the Project Deployment Model, as discussed here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh213290(v=sql.110).aspx . In both scenarios, the core ideas in a configuration scheme are: Provide the ability to move packages through environments without ...

Based on Part 1 of Upgrading your SSIS Management Framework , you’ve decided to go with a hybrid approach for your framework.  The hybrid approach which will use some components of the custom framework (this post will use the framework provided in SSIS PDS , but the concepts are applicable to any custom framework) and also utilize the standard SSIS framework.  This allows you to tie your existing package ecosystem with the latest and greatest built-in framework. Let’s talk through an overview of what we’re going to do and then explain each of the steps needed to implement it. Overview When it comes down to it, we need to accomplish two main things for this hybrid approach: tie our logging tables together and tie our configuration tables together.  When it comes to logging, each system has its own important identifier (ID) that can get you to anything else in the system.  The important ID in the custom SSIS framework is the PackageLogID, and the important ID in th...