After trying a million combinations, I finally figured out how to export data in SSIS using an OLE DB source (SQL Server) and a flat file destination. In the end all I really should have done was use "ENCODING UTF16" in the COPY command in Redshift. None of the settings I changed in SSIS actually helped, aside from making sure the Unicode box was checked ......

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I updated my production SQL Server 2012 cluster from SP1 to SP3 CU1 last night and had to spend an hour trying to figure out why the SQL Server Engine service wouldn't start for one of my two instances. Weirdly the other instance worked fine after the upgrade. The error logs were no help at all. It was only by the magic of the gods that I happened upon ......

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I started getting timeouts from SSIS 2012 using the SSISDB and I couldn't make any sense of them, they seemed random. When things were bad I couldn't even expand the Integration Services Catalogs node in SSMS. Just by sheer luck I figured out the problem: too much data was being logged in SSISDB and the data file was up to 180 GB, with the log file ......

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ERROR: cannot execute DELETE in a read-only transactionI kept getting errors like that but I didn't think anything had changed with my company's PostgreSQL installation. It turned out that there was a VIP that got applied to a secondary server (slave perhaps, made it a duplicate VIP) so nine times out of ten I was hitting the wrong server. I hope this ......

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I had an SSIS 2008 package that copied new/changed data from the production database to an archive database every 2 minutes using Change Tracking, a staging database, etc. The package was stored in the SSIS repository in the SQL Server 2008 instance where the archive database was stored. I upgraded the package to SSIS 2012 and deployed it to the SQL ......

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My Droid Razr was driving me crazy with how slow it was to respond most of the time and how quickly the battery would get drained. I finally gave in and did a hard reset on it, which was a little annoying because I thought my apps would get restored and they didn't, but I'm very glad I did it. My phone can finally make it most of the day without being ......

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Today I got an error in Access 2013 saying "Cannot open database ''. It maybe not be a database that your application recognizes, or the file may be corrupt."After doing some digging I figured out that Access 2013 has a database limit of around 2 GB, so when I was trying to import data that would push me past that limit, instead of giving me a useful ......

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Ever have to create insert statements for a SQL Server table but can't figure out how to do so without hitting a character limit?  The only way I found (with rows that are over 50,000 characters) was to use sqlcmd with the -y parameter set to 0.

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Want to create a SQL Server query using a table created at runtime that just has month numbers and year numbers? I did, so here's how I did it:DECLARE @StartDate datetime = '9/1/12', @EndDate datetime = '8/1/13'CREATE TABLE #cal (TheYear int, TheMonth int)INSERT #calSELECT YEAR(dateadd(month, number, @StartDate)), MONTH(dateadd(month, number, @StartDate))FROM ......

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I was getting the error below when trying to deploy to my SQL 2008 R2 cluster, which was odd since I had never had any trouble before. The problem ended up being that when I double clicked on the SSISDeploymentManifest file my computer was using the SQL 2012 version of the deployment utility because I had recently installed it. Once I used the 2008 ......

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Statistics for INDEX 'IX_DWOrderStatus_DWDateEnd... ......

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I got this message from the 2012 version of the console after installing the Power Tools found here:

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Ever wonder why when you click on the green line in SSIS the Data Flow Path Editor doesn't actually let you edit anything?  I did.  Then I realized I needed to make the changes I wanted in the source task by right-clicking it and selecting Show Advanced Editor.

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Today I got an exception in a report using SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2, but only when attempting to go to the last page of a large report: The report execution sgjahs45wg5vkmi05lq4zaee has expired or cannot be found.;Digging into the logs I found this:library!ReportServer_0... e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices... ......

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