Mission

Helping You Build Success

Develop Your Path to Greatness

Thinking back to my first few months working with SSMS, SSIS and SSRS I felt completely lost and wondered if I had just made a huge mistake. Sitting in meetings and discussing various tasks with my co workers I had no idea what they were talking about. They would come over and say that we need to make a change and need to throw a case statement in and change the stored proc, or this job or that job failed I needed to go check the job logs and see what the errors were. I had no idea what they were talking about.

After the those first few months I started to understand what they were talking about and where to find information when anything failed, but that was about the extent of it. Then the day came where my boss handed me my first solo task, a simple lift and move. I opened Visual Studios, started a new project in Business Intelligence and stared Blankley at the screen. At that moment I realized that I had no idea how to even start and thought once again I made a huge mistake.

I did the next logical step, I opened Internet Explorer (because other browsers were blocked by company settings) and typed www.Google.com and tried to find tutorials to show what I need to do. I found lots of tutorials and information, but they all had the same issues, they were either written in a more advanced level than I was at or their setup did not match anything I had so I could not reproduce the results. I ended up finishing the job with some help of a more senior developer after I spent two days with no results. Now anyone that knows SSIS knows a lift and move should only take about ten minutes to create.

That was a few years ago, now the senior developers that I was asking thousands of questions to every day now come to me for help. Over the years I have created the simple jobs that move files or create simple reports to incorporating multiple sources such as Oracle, Informix and even Active Directory. I have created reports in SSRS that manipulate table data and collected data that has never been available before for a large Global corporation.

If up to this point you are lost don’t worry, my focus is creating easy to follow tutorials and examples using tools and data sources that are available to anyone and can be all installed on your local device. If you have zero knowledge about reporting but the willingness to learn then you have found the right place to be. Now if you are reading this and thinking well this is a waste of my time, I already know the basics, then you may still learn a few new tricks and ideas in the examples that will be provided.

This site will continue to grow for your benefit as wells as mine, every time I solve a new challenge, I will add it to the examples when I can. This gives both myself as the author and you as the reader the chance to learn together, maybe its something you have done already and can provide a little insight as to what can be done to improve my process or maybe my process solves a minor error or performance issue that you are having with yours.

Let us start on this journey and start changing the way reporting is done. I have heard way too many times that it can not be done. To me that is the one phrase that should never be said, just because it may be extremely difficult or you lack the current data to perform the task does not make it impossible just more of a challenge.