One of the few sessions I was able to see last week at the PASS European Conference (I had to leave very early, unfortunately) was Markus Raatz’s excellent “New Treasures for Microsoft BI Found on Codeplex”. Among other things, he showed off a new project on Codeplex that I hadn’t seen before: SQL Server Metadata Toolkit 2008. It’s an updated version of the SQL Server Metadata Toolkit that was released for 2005 a few years ago, and allows you to trace metadata dependencies between the relational database, SSIS packages and SSAS objects. So if, for example, you change a column name in a dimension table you should be able to work out which SSIS packages and which SSAS dimensions will be broken. You can download it here:
http://sqlmetadata.codeplex.com/
I’ve not had a chance to download it yet, but it looks like it will be very useful.
I\’m wondering what differences this has from 2005 version. I actually just took the 2005 version and modified it to work with 2008. It was package id (guids) and the like that had to change, and references in the code to the 2008 assemblies.I\’m looking forward to playing with this.
The major addition (as far as I can see) is a sql parser to extract the tablenames from SQL queries. Which is extremely useful I think.