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Thanks to Reitse for the invitation ! Reitse Eskens has asked about our failures, which is just what I wanted to dwell on to start the year! 😆 He’s specifically asked about our abandoned projects. While it’s easy to label these as “failures,” I don’t think they are. Abandoned projects are a learning path. If you learned something during a project, it is certainly a success, at least on some level. I feel like there is usually a good reason for abandoning a project, however. A lot of times the needs and requirements will change in the middle of a project. Perhaps another technology you previously rejected has released an update with the killer feature it was missing, so you drop everything and head in that direction. Maybe your budget gets rug-pulled, and you need to abandon what you are doing or rescope and find a new and cheaper way to accomplish your goal.

Recently, I was shopping for some upgrades for my home office on Amazon and a few of the things I really wanted were out of stock at the time. I thought it was really annoying to have to remember to go and check on the things on a periodic basis to see if they were back in stock, and I didn’t see anything on Amazon’s site that would send me an email or anything if and when the stock was replenished. (Hint to Amazon: this would be a great idea!)

It’s possible! # I’ve been looking for the best way to zip files using SSIS for a while now. Every time I search, however, the recommended solution has always been to use the Execute Process task and call 7-Zip (or your favorite zip utility) either directly or using a .bat file. This has been working just fine so far, but I’ve been on a bit of a mission to remove as many unnecessary third-party dependencies from the server as I can.

Do you ever get Excel files where the sheet name changes on you every single time? It’s like a never-ending puzzle in my ETL workflows, and trying to automate it? Nightmare. I know, I know, you’ll probably say ditch Excel, but good luck telling that to the clients. But guess what? SSIS has a slick trick up its sleeve to deal with this mess – scripting to the rescue!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how to connect to Azure via PowerShell and a service principal. It’s super useful, and allows us to do things like change the size of a VM. https://www.stephenwuebker.com/2019/05/30/connecting-to-azure-using-azure-powershell-and-a-service-principal/ In our environment, we need to toggle a VM between sizes on a fairly regular basis. Why? Well, because for some weeks of the month, the workload on that VM is high and we need the performance of a more powerful VM. However, during the rest of the month, the workload is relatively low and we don’t need as many resources, so we’ll reduce the size to save money.

Here’s a quick one-liner that I find super-useful. If your processes are anything like mine, you’ve got scripts and/or SSIS packages that are supposed to run at a certain time of the month or maybe a certain day of the week. Right? Perhaps your jobs run and output files. Nothing out of the ordinary. Usually these work fine and everything is good… except for those times when “that guy” is late, and the data your jobs depend on isn’t there on time. So you have to delay your jobs and when you can finally run them, your output files are incorrectly named.

Azure PowerShell provides a cross-platform way to manage your Azure resources without actually having to log in to the portal. Obvious benefits here include being able to script away management tasks and speed up administration tasks by using the command line. Microsoft provides some great documentation and installation instructions here: