Please register for our June 1st meeting. It helps with the food order.

6:00 – 6:30 Food and Networking sponsored by Quest Software
6:30 – 6:40 Announcements
6:40 – 8:15 John Welch: Processing Flat Files with SSIS
8:15 – 8:30 Closing remarks and give-a-ways (We have Windows 7, books, free training and a bunch of stuff from Quest Software to give a way)
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Processing Flat Files with SSIS

When doing data integration, a common requirement is to work with flat files, whether for importing data into a system from an external source, or to export it to provide to other systems. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) supports flat files, but there can be a number of challenges when working with them. This is particularly true if your flat files have multiple data formats contained in a single file, the data has complex formatting, or the files have inconsistent formatting. This session will help you to be more efficient when working with these types of files. You'll learn to handle missing delimiters in the files, and parsing files that have multiple data formats. You'll also see how to produce complex output formats, like headers and footers that contain summary information.

Takeaways:
1.      Learn to handle complex formatting in flat files
2.      See the techniques to deal with poorly formatted input files
3.      See the available open source components for processing flat files

John Welch is BI Architect with Varigence. Varigence builds tools and frameworks that enable the creation and management of end-to-end business intelligence solutions with unprecedented ease and speed. John has been working with business intelligence and data warehousing technologies for 9 years, with a focus on Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments. He is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP), an award given due to his commitment to sharing his knowledge with the IT community.  John is an experienced speaker, having given presentations at Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conferences, the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference, Software Development West (SD West), Software Management Conference (ASM/SM), and others. He has also contributed to three recent books on SQL Server 2008, "Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration", "Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008", and "SQL Server MVP Deep Dives".

John writes a blog on business intelligence topics at http://agilebi.com/cs/blogs/bipartisan. He also writes one focused on SSIS topics at http://agilebi.com/CS/blogs/jwelch/. He is also active in open source projects that help ease the development process for Microsoft BI developers, including BIDS Helper (http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper), an add-in for Business Intelligence Development Studio that adds commonly needed functionality to the environment. He is also the lead developer on ssisUnit (http://www.codeplex.com/ssisUnit), a unit testing framework for SSIS.