April 2010 - Posts

I gave a presentation at today’s SQL Saturday in NY on replacing SSIS with PowerShell.

You can view the presentation, or see below for the two second summary:

  • SSIS is a terrible development tool
  • Many SSIS features can be built with out much effort with PowerShell, C#, and the TPL
  • See the demos

The code is hosted at http://psis.codeplex.com/ Currently it has the following capabilities

  • Concurrent bulk data transfer
  • Single pass star-schema populator

Contact me if you’d like to contribute or collaborate on this.

Of late, our broadband internet has been feeling sluggish. A call to the company took way more hold-time than I wanted to spend, and it only fixed the problem for a short while. Thus a perfect opportunity to play with some new tech to solve a problem, in this case, documenting a systemic issue from a service provider.

The goal – a log a internet speeds, taken say every 15 min. Recording ping time, upload speed, download speed, and local LAN usage.

 

The solution

  • A WCF service to measure speeds
    • Internet speed was measured via speedtest.net
    • LAN usage was measured by querying my router for packets received and sent
  • A SQL express instance to persist the data
  • A PowerShell script to invoke the WCF service – launched by Windows’ Task Scheduler
  • An OData WCF Data Service to allow me to read the data
  • MS PowerPivot to show a nice viz (scratch that, the beta expired)
  • LinqPad to get the data, export it to excel
  • Tableau Public to show the viz

 

 

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