Other Places to go...

In my first proper contribution to this years blogging (yeah, yeah, I know) I was going to give a quick overview of some of the blogs I regularly read and why.

First up is a Mark Hill (http://markhill.org/blog). I've known Mark for a number of years and worked with him for almost all that time. His blog is in his own words "a ramble through Microsoft BI technologies". Give the guy a little credit here, it's not a ramble but quite an insightful comment on Microsoft’s BI platform and essential viewing if you're looking for information on the problems you'll face implementing large scale SSIS and Analysis Services systems and especially if you're looking to put 64 bit servers within your architecture.

Next is Thiru Sutha's SQL Server 2005 BI blog (http://tsutha.blogspot.com/). Again someone I've know and worked with for a number of years has been working on the same projects as Mark Hill and significantly contributed to stabilising 64 bit SSIS. Definitely worth a viewing and contains some good example SSIS packages for your pleasure in addition to postings on known SSIS bugs.

Chris Webb (http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/) is a pretty well known individual in the world of Microsoft business intelligence and is your first port of call if you need to know anything about using MDX in the field. His collaboration in the latest version of MDX Solutions (along with George Spofford amongst others) gives the book a lot more weight and makes it an excellent guide to anyone looking to enhance their MDX knowledge.

Off the BI band wagon slightly here The Joy of Code (http://www.thejoyofcode.com/) is a collaborative blog that includes Josh Twist, a colleague I’ve worked with recently on a SQL Server 2005 BI architecture implementation. Josh is .Net developer by trade but was huge benefit to the projects custom SSIS component development. A number of the SSIS components he worked on are available there with example code for download, some of which I’ll discuss in further detail later along with some recommended applications.

Finally another SSIS orientated blog from Jamie Thomson (http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson). I have, lets say, borrowed plenty of SSIS code from this site recently and his postings on things like what you could do in DTS but aren’t as obvious in SSIS are very useful for anyone making that transition.
Well that’s it for now hopefully you’ll find these sites as useful as I have.

Steve