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Olivier Van Steenlandt Posts

SSAS Tabular Model – Help – I can’t find my Dimensions in Excel

Problem statement A colleague reached out last week while connecting to one of our SQL Server Analysis Services models in Excel. He couldn’t find the expected Attribute folders in the model. He was looking for the following dimensions: So I started to investigate. As a first test, I connected to the same model in Excel and I was surprised that the “lost” dimensions were perfectly visible to me. On this particular SSAS Tabular Model, we…

Azure DevOps Pipelines – SQL Server Deploy – One to rule them all

In one of my previous blog posts, I used the SQL Server database deploy task to deploy my DACPAC to SQL Server. Unfortunately, this task became deprecated in Release Pipelines. In this blog post, I would like to share the alternative. Additionally, we will be moving from a Classic Release pipeline to a YAML pipeline. The YAML pipeline will be responsible for building and deploying our Database Projects. Quick Overview Why move to YAML? What…

Migrate Multiple SSRS Reports at once to Power BI Paginated Reports

A few weeks ago I released a blog post about migrating SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports. At that point in time, I wasn’t aware of any way to migrate multiple SSRS Reports in one go. Meanwhile, I have done some research and experimented a bit. In this blog post, I will be going through 2 different ways to migrate multiple SSRS Reports at once to Power BI. Quick Overview Reporting Portal —Migration —Validation…

Episode 012 – Finding (Data) Friends

No new technical blog post for now, I’m currently enjoying some time off where I’m working on new content. A brand new session and some new blog posts as well. I had the pleasure to join Jess Pomfret (LinkedIn, Twitter) and Ben Weissman (LinkedIn, Twitter) during an episode of Finding (Data) Friends. For the people that don’t know this podcast yet, every week, Jess and Ben are inviting a new person onto the podcast to…

Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines – Deploy to Azure SQL

In my previous blog post, we created an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline to automate our Database Project Build process. In this blog post, we are going to create an Azure DevOps YAML Release Pipeline for Azure SQL. Quick Overview Prerequisites Step-by-step Example —Download Pipeline Artifact —Deploy Dacpac to Azure SQL —Adding the right trigger Considerations Prerequisites If you are just joining this blog post series and you want to follow the step-by-step examples, I advise…

Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines – Building Database Projects

In previous blog posts, I explained how to automate the Database Project Build & Deployment process using Azure DevOps (Release) Pipelines. These blog posts focused on setting up as easily as possible using the Classic Editor. In this blog post, I’m going through the steps of setting up a build pipeline using YAML. Quick Overview Why YAML? Step-by-step Example Important Notice Why YAML? We have been creating our deployment pipelines with the classic editor. Why…

Stop SSIS Package Execution

Problem Statement Today, I was working on a SSIS Package that executes a Python script for every day I want to retrieve the data. Since I was reloading data for a couple of months in my development environment, the process took quite some time. I developed my package in Visual Studio 2019 and deployed my changes to my SSIS Catalog (SSISDB in my case). As soon as my SSIS Package was deployed I started the…

Automate your Database Deployments for SQL Server using Azure DevOps Releases

In my previous blog post, Automate your Database Deployments for Azure SQL using Azure DevOps Releases, I described how to automate your database deployments for Azure SQL. Now, in this blog post, we are going to take a look at how we can automate deployments for SQL Server. Since the setup is a bit different in comparison with Azure SQL, we will start with the prerequisites first. Quick Overview Prerequisite Step-by-step Example —Installing an Azure…

Visual Studio Build in Azure DevOps Pipelines failing on latest Windows vmImage

Problem statement In the past couple of years, I have learned how to work with Azure DevOps Pipelines (Pipelines & Release Pipelines) using the Classic Editor. Last week, I started to play around with Azure DevOps YAML Pipelines. For some reason, I wasn’t able to build my Database Project using the latest vmImage for windows in Azure DevOps. My Pipeline YAML file looked like this: As you can see, I wanted to use the windows-latest…

Automate your Database Deployments for Azure SQL using Azure DevOps Releases

In my previous blog post, Automate your Database Builds – Using Azure DevOps Pipelines, we successfully automated our Build process. As a next step, we will be automating our deployment process to Azure SQL. In this blog post, we will go through the process step-by-step to set up our Release pipeline in Azure DevOps and execute our first release just by clicking a button. Quick Overview Prerequisite Step-by-step Example Using Variables in the Release Pipeline…