Neal Waterstreet

2015 Goals

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Back at it with another beginning of the year goal post. The best part of this kind of post is being able to look back and say “Man, what was I thinking? or “Wow, I really changed direction from where I thought I was going!”. My plan for this year is to make all of my goals for this year quantifiable. We’ll see how it goes…

Blogging: Its number one on my list for a reason. I really want to improve here and I will set the goal pretty high, at least for me.
Goal: 100 posts for 2015

Presentations: I am speaking at a meeting in March (need to finish that up) and planning on submitting to a few SQLSaturdays to see if I can present. I’d also like to present online, maybe to the Healthcare VC.
Goal: 3 presentations total

Books: I’m going to change this up this year and not just set a number, but also add a requirement of writing up a review.
Goal: 5 technical/career related books with reviews

Conference attendance: This one may be tough since attending may be out of my control. I had big plans this year of going to 3, but that won’t be happening.
Goal: 1

SQLSaturday: I went to the very first SQLSaturday and in many ways that was the tipping point for me choosing a career with data. I have not attended nearly as many of these as I intended mainly due to commitments with family. I’m going to make a better effort to attend more this year.
Goal: 3

Certifications: This is one goal where it should be pretty reasonable to make show progress. I am one exam away from MCSE and I need to get that wrapped up. The Tableau Desktop and Hortonworks Certified Apache Hadoop 2.0 Developer certification exams look possible here too. Maybe not both, but I should be able to make one of them happen in 2015.
Goal: 2

Twitter: Hard to set a goal for this one. Do I measure in terms of interaction? Followers? Tweets? Tweeting more will make the other two follow, right? As of now, I have 257 total. Doubling that should not be too difficult.
Goal: 250 tweets for the year

PASS Healthcare Virtual Chapter: This one is especially difficult due to the limited presenters available. We are trying to get some momentum going with the group. If that happens a meeting every other month should be attainable.
Goal: 6 presentations

OK, there there are. Goals always change due to unknown factors and I don’t expect these to be any different. I want to keep up this year and adjust as needed, possibly even adding more depending on what happens.

Accessing CSV files on a UNC file share

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Recently I was working on a project to extract data from CSV files for a client. The package was pretty standard and it ran fine under my account in BIDS. The issue occurred when I tried to deploy and executed under the service account. The error message “Description: The file name property is not valid. The file name is a device or contains invalid characters” was not too helpful, but it did lead me in the right direction.

After asking around I found that another developer had a similar issue and pointed me to a couple of blog posts:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1128829-148-2.aspx

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons/archive/2010/03/03/SSIS—Access-Denied-with-UNC-paths—The-file-name-is-a-device-or-contains-invalid-characters.aspx

It turned out that the service account had access to the directory that contained the CSV files, but not the entire path.

\\Server\Directory 1\Directory 2\CSV Files\My File.csv

Once the account was granted access to ‘Directory 1’ and ‘Directory 2’ the issue was resolved. Hopefully this post will save someone some time if they run into this.

Sling TV trial

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I signed up for Sling TV as soon as it was announced. I was still looking to replace Aereo, but couldn’t find anything. Sling TV is a lot better, but it doesn’t really have a DVR. I finally got my invite yesterday.

Sling TV seems to provide what I really wanted – ESPN/ESPN2 and CNN. Those were really the only channels I missed that were not provided OTA. There is a pretty good set of channels inluded and for an extra fee you can purchase more channels. The sports channels package includes all the ESPN channels and I may add that in the fall. For now I think I am going with some channels for the kids.

At first glance, the picture quality is very good streaming on my Roku. I was able to install phone it on my phone and tablet and the quality was good there too. One problem is see is that it looks like only one stream can be used at a time. When I turned on the tablet the television paused. This could be a problem but we’ll have to wait and see.

No picture quality problems with college basketball on ESPN and the other channels look great too. I just wish I would’ve had this during the college bowl season…

Update: AMC is now included in the base package – Better Call Saul/The Walking Dead/Mad Men.

PASS Healthcare February meeting

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Time to jump back into the Healthcare VC with our first meeting of 2015. This month’s speaker is by David Moutray. Please sign up at the PASS Healthcare website. The meeting is scheduled for Thursday, February 19, 2015 at 1 PM (Eastern).

Here are some details on David’s presentation.

Topic Name
Data Quality: Boosting Software Performance and Business Profit

Topic Synopsis
If “Data is the Lifeblood of Modern Business,” then most businesses are walking corpses with sludge in their veins, because 10% to 25% of all data records in the average enterprise are wrong. Until the dramatic problems of Data Quality Management are addressed, SQL can never fulfill its original promise to eliminate application “silos”, enable systems to communicate and provide useful, actionable information to the modern business. I believe that we are on the cusp of a revolution in Data Quality that is even greater in scope and impact than the revolution in manufacturing quality that began over 40 years ago. Businesses that make the transition will survive and thrive. Those that don’t will finally stop shambling about and lay down to die. What is this revolution in Data Quality? How can you be a part of it (and avoid the headman’s ax)?!? This presentation will change the way you think about your jobs as Database Administrators and Application Developers.

Speaker Bio
As a database administrator and ETL developer for a large data warehouse team, I am passionate about fast query performance, data integrity and the relational data model. Like most Database Administrators, I am highly opinionated, but unlike some, I am willing to endure personal abuse in the spirit of open discussion. I also tell (bad) jokes. Hecklers are welcome.