Tonight I presented a 1-hour session about applying Continuous Integration at the Microsoft Advanced Analytics User Group Belgium. The session was an "espresso version" from the 2-day course, skipping things like Git, setting up VSTS build environments etc. Great fun to be here, thanks for the invite! The slides can be found have disappeared at
Continue reading...
When setting up Continuous Integration in VSTS, chances are you’ll run into the problem of building SSIS projects: where database projects are building just fine, SSIS just doesn’t build out-of-the-box (at least not at the time of writing). Here’s how you fix it:
Continue reading...
If you want to set up Continuous Integration using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) in order to build your BI projects, you'll run into the fact that some project types can be built and released out-of-the-box by MSBuild, while others need specific logic to create or deploy artifacts. In this post, I share my current
Continue reading...
With Continuous Integration working for my Data Warehousing solution (SQL Server, SSAS Tabular, SSIS), it's time to step forward. Before moving to Continuous Deployment, I want to have a rigorous and automated testing on my EDW. But how to get there?
Continue reading...
As you might know, I'm keeping an eye on how I can automate my Data Warehousing testing. In "Automated Testing for the Data Warehouse" my observation was In essence, testing a Data Warehouse isn't that complex It turns out I'm not the only one thinking about this (really? 😉 ). Some time ago I listened to
Continue reading...
Wait, didn't I post this already several weeks ago? Well, almost. A few weeks ago, I showed how to set up a build agent using devenv.com. Unfortunately, I ran into some problems like failing builds not reporting failure and SSAS Tabular projects not building correctly. However, it turns out to be pretty easy to build
Continue reading...
In my earlier post "Automated Deployments using Visual Studio" I metioned that the method described was a workaround because I hadn't figured out how to do a continuous build in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) yet. With hindsight, that workaround was not really needed: VSTS build turns out to be só easy, that it's ridiculous
Continue reading...
In my earlier post "Automated Testing for the Data Warehouse", I sketched the outlines of what would be needed in order to achieve automated testing for your Data Warehouse solutions. Today, I want to look at the first step: build & deploy. Between the previous post and the current one, some useful content about this has been written already
Continue reading...
Case: we've integrated two sources of customers. We want to add a third source. Q: How do we at the same time know that our current integration and solutions will continue to work while at the same time integrating the new sources? A: Test it. Q: How do we get faster deployments and more stability? A: Automate the tests, so
Continue reading...
Last week, I had an interesting question from one of my clients about estimates of planned commute distances. For example: What is the distance I travel when I, living at Kalverstraat 7 (Amsterdam) commute five days a week to my customer in Paris (1, rue Victor Cousin)? By the way: it should be calculated for all employees, for
Continue reading...
