North West Business Intelligence Ltd

Welcome to North West Business Intelligence

North West Business Intelligence is a new company founded in 2008 providing Business Intelligence Consultancy Services to small to medium sized businesses in the North West. Founded by dedicated IT Professionals after a number of years in the IT industry to better focus on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing in the Financial Services Sector.

Specialising in Business Intelligence and, in particular, solutions based on Microsoft products has allowed the business to focus on a core set of solutions based around Microsoft SQL Server and supporting Business Intelligence products such as Cognos, Business Objects, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Office Sharepoint.

In addition, ad-hoc requirements for custom application building, particularly in web technologies and mobile applications including business iOS development.

Available from short consultancies to long term project work, don't hesitate to contact us using the contact form.

SSIS FTP Task Error: Failed to lock variable

Monday, 23 January 2012 12:38 Andy Button

Just encountered a frustrating error that prevented a new SSIS package from compiling and running. FTP Tasks had stubborn red crosses against them with the cryptic errors.

Error    1    Validation error. Delete C1 CTRL : Failed to lock variable "" for read access with error 0xC0010001 "The variable cannot be found. This occurs when an attempt is made to retrieve a variable from the Variables collection on a container during execution of the package, and the variable is not there. The variable name may have changed or the variable is not being created.".     Blah.dtsx    0    0
Error    2    Validation error. Delete C1 CTRL : The Validate method on the task failed, and returned error code 0x80131500 (Failed to lock variable "" for read access with error 0xC0010001 "The variable cannot be found. This occurs when an attempt is made to retrieve a variable from the Variables collection on a container during execution of the package, and the variable is not there. The variable name may have changed or the variable is not being created.". ). The Validate method must succeed and indicate the result using an "out" parameter.     Blah.dtsx    0    0
Error    3    Validation error. Delete C1 CTRL : There were errors during task validation.    Blah.dtsx    0    0

OSX Snow Leopard Freezing in VMWare

Monday, 04 October 2010 10:00 Andy Button

Suffering strange and inexplicable freezes in VMWare running Snow Leopard as a VM? Then this article by Surinder Bhomra will almost certainly help.

Surinder's blog post

ASP.NET MVC2 & Areas : Error 404 Resource not found

Wednesday, 20 October 2010 07:54 Andy Button

I've started (probably later than I should) messing around with ASP.NET MVC 2 for a client project. I'd been writing everything very traditionally as an ASP.NET application and it was getting more and more complicated and harder to improve as it's not my main job but more of a bolt on to what I actually do day to day which is BI and Data Architecture.

As always, I read through a couple of tutorials then decided to have a go. I'd played with Symfony using PHP a couple of years ago and felt I understood the MVC concept OK to dive in seeing if it was a viable alternative to the messy code I was currently creating. As is so often the case, I didn't read the part of the tutorial that covered Areas and started developing. After a day I started to think about the application structure and realised it had four quite distinct functions and stumbled upon areas.

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 20 October 2010 08:04 ) Read more...

How to prevent FTP Errors failing SSIS package

Wednesday, 22 September 2010 09:35 Andy Button

Stumbled on an issue today designing some FTP management SSIS packages for a client. The job needed to tidy up after itself and delete any files from the FTP server that it had successfully retrieved and validated. Unfortunately, once a backlog of files started building up, the package was trying to delete files on the FTP server that didn't exist and the whole package stopped dead even though this wasn't a critical error.

I tried the various Force Success methods available through the normal Control Flow options but none worked, the package always stopped and wouldn't handle the problem.

So after visiting this link the solution was simple if a little strange. To summarise, you need an event handler on the FTP step and set the ForceExecutionResult value to Success. All works nicely now and as I'm not interested in the errors anyway it handles them beautifully.

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