Neal Waterstreet

Speaking at SQLSaturday #733 Atlanta 2018

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On Saturday, May 19th, I’m speaking at SQLSaturday #733 Atlanta 2018! I’m presenting my session “Master Data Management with SQL Server 2016 MDS”. The event is at a new location again this year, Gwinnett Technical College on Old Milton Pkwy. I’m speaking during the first sessions at 8 a.m. in the Patagonia room. Nothing like a fresh cup of MDM first thing in the morning to get the day started!

Want to know the position Master Data Management and MDS play in an organization’s overall data strategy? We’ll review the key concepts and the different roles and responsibilities to help you get your organization moving forward with MDM. We’ll then take a look at the features of SQL Server 2016 MDS that make it an excellent tool for MDM. This demo-packed presentation will cover architecture and installation, different ways of processing data, hierarchies, security and many other features that will get you up and running with MDS.

Solved: Presenting with Lenovo W541

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Recently I’ve been presenting much more often and have run into a problem during my presentations. It has to do with my Lenovo W541 connecting to projectors. I would connect and my main display was fine, but when I wanted to switch to the demos I was only able to extend the screen and not duplicate. This was a nightmare for my demos since I would have to turn and look at the screen instead of the audience. Obviously, this really distracted from the presentations and was noted in some of the feedback I received.

At first, I thought I had resolved this by switching resolutions. That seemed to work somewhat but made the screen unusable during the demos. 800*600 just doesn’t work very well for anything.

I did a little research and found out that the NVIDIA display card does not switch over by default. It must be updated in the BIOS and not through the NVIDIA Desktop Manager.

In the BIOS, go to Display >> Discrete GFX Perf Mode >> High Performance and restart.

There might be some performance hit after the display card is switched. I haven’t noticed any difference in performance or battery.

MDSERR310029

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MDSERR310029|The status of the specified batch is not valid.

This error occurs when using the entity-based staging process (leaf tables). If multiple entries of the same BatchTag value are executed concurrently, this error can appear. It can happen in the same entity or different entities or models.

The best solution I’ve found is to update mdm.tblStgBatch and set the status_id for the BatchTag to completed. You can then update the BatchTag name in the leaf and reset the ImportStatus_ID back to 0 and reprocess the batch.

An alternative is to append a timestamp to the BatchTag to make it unique. That should keep this from happening.

Credit on this to James Serra, who has a good post on this error, and to Microsoft.

Default value for “ErrorCode”

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MDS 2016 is a big improvement over the previous versions. There are many enhancements in almost every area. One change I had not noticed in MDS 2016 is that a default value has been added for the “ErrorCode” attribute in the staging tables.

One situation where this may be an issue is when SSIS is used to stage data. If the “Keep nulls” value is checked in the Destination configuration, the insert will result in an error.