Tim Mitchell

PASS Data Summit 2025 Recap

Tim Mitchell — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 12:00:22 +0000

Last week, I attended the annual PASS Data Summit in Seattle. This was the fourth year of the event since Red Gate took over stewardship of PASS after that organization ceased operations in 2021. This has always been my favorite data community event; I first attended in 2005, and since 2009 I haven’t missed a single Summit. This year’s Summit...

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Using Python Code in SSIS

Tim Mitchell — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 12:15:03 +0000

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a mature, proven tool for ETL orchestration and data movement. In recent years, Python has exploded in popularity as a data movement and analysis tool. Surprisingly, though, there are no native hooks for Python in SSIS. In my experience using each of these tools independently, I’d love to see an extension of SSIS to...

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T-SQL Tuesday #179 Roundup: The Data Detective Toolkit

Tim Mitchell — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 11:00:48 +0000

Earlier this month, I hosted the monthly T-SQL Tuesday invitation in which I asked, “What’s in your data detective toolkit?” We got some great responses which I’ll recap here, and I’ll share a few thoughts of my own at the end. First up, Rob Farley shared his approach, which focuses on the bigger picture of the business use of the...

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T-SQL Tuesday #179: What’s In Your Data Detective Toolkit?

Tim Mitchell — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 14:04:44 +0000

Most of us who work with data have, at least a few times, been presented with a challenge to explore and attempt to make sense of a poorly-defined set of data. Often it’s a collection of text files or Excel documents without any context or documentation. In other cases, it’s a database with no data map or metadata to help...

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Reflections on My First-Ever Presentation, Fifteen Years Later

Tim Mitchell — Wed, 03 May 2023 18:42:02 +0000

May 3rd represents a small but significant milestone in my career. It was 15 years ago today, on May 3, 2008, when I delivered my first public technical presentation. That event, as brief as it was, helped to set in motion a chain of events that I could never have predicted. In 2008, I was working in healthcare, and had...

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My Office Setup

Tim Mitchell — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 13:00:48 +0000

At the PASS Summit a few weeks ago, I had a great chat with some folks about our home office setups. More and more of us are working from home these days, giving us the freedom to customize our workspace to suit our individual wants. However, we rarely get to see the the home offices of others (other than through...

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Returning to PASS Summit

Tim Mitchell — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 17:20:07 +0000

In just a couple of weeks, the PASS Summit will return to Seattle, Washington. This one will be extra special, since it’s going to be the first in-person Summit in three years. When COVID upended normal life back in March of 2020, it also had a huge impact on in-person events. That year, the PASS Summit was changed from in-person...

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Creating a Generic SSRS Report

Tim Mitchell — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 15:23:33 +0000

Creating useful reports is part art and part science. On one end of the spectrum, you have visually appealing and highly customized reports and dashboards that are truly works of art. These often illicit “oohs” and “aahs” at first glance, and can help to creatively tell the story of the underlying data. On the other end of the spectrum is...

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What Stephen King Taught Me About Data Storytelling

Tim Mitchell — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 14:00:45 +0000

I’ve been a fan of macabre fiction writer Stephen King since I first picked up The Dark Half sometime in the early 1990s. Since then I’ve read dozens of his books, and I’ve never been disappointed by a single one. However, when I finally got around to reading the two-decades-old book On Writing, I found not only some incredibly helpful...

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Let’s Talk About Your Development Environment

Tim Mitchell — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 11:30:04 +0000

Let’s talk about your development environment. Specifically, I’d like to chat with you about the virtual space where your data architecture team, software developers, and information curators do their development and testing work. A proper development environment is logically separated from the production environment, and is often further partitioned into different realms for initial development, data or functional validation, and...

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