Aside

What???

I came across two stories that seem eerily related.

Operating In the Dark (NY Times Op-Ed)

The Web site of Representative Daniel Webster, Republican of Florida, instructs visitors to click on a link for “Census data for the 8th district” to learn about the area’s economy, businesses, income, employment, homeownership and other important features. And yet, on Wednesday, Mr. Webster declared that the Census Bureau’sAmerican Community Survey — the source for much of that data — is an unconstitutional breach of privacy…

I use the ACS in my work. We use the data in our advocacy work. It is a vital tool.

Here’s the other article:

Colonized by Corporations

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class…

What these articles have to do with each other is left as an exercise to the reader. Hint: try reading them.

Why the extra sets of scroll bars when using pre-VS 2010 ReportViewer controls?

When you begin to use the Visual Studio 2005/8 ReportViewer web control (to view SQL Server Reporting Services reports) you are likely to find that it presents an extra set of scroll bars within the web page, making it hard to use. This is normal and there are several ways to make them go away. You can read about the reasons for the control’s behavior here (it is good to know that it will be “fixed in the next version,” really), and you can find lots of advice on the web about what to do about it (until the next version is ready).

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Megan’s SQL Server Blog

For years I have been relying upon the Web for quick answers about how to do things in SQL Server and ASP.NET (among other things), and it has saved me a huge amount of time not having to reinvent the wheel.  This is my attempt to return the favor: I will be writing articles about unique or otherwise interesting problems (to someone facing them) that I have had to solve.

If you find any of this helpful, please let me know.

Megan

Who Knew? — The Excel source in SSIS

This last week I wrote two SSIS packages (SQL Server 2005) that read data that was originally published using Excel .xls format and populated a staging table. The data is only published once a year, with perhaps one or two corrections following, but I thought I would save a little bit of trouble and use the Excel data source to read all of the worksheets that I needed from one source. After all, the import wizard uses it when it builds a package for you.

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