Mark White's BI Blog

I've just released a service which assists in refreshing Excel PowerPivot reports. Normally you need SharePoint in order to refresh server-side excel reports. Businesses that don't want to adopt SharePoint, but do want to share Excel files now have a means of refreshing PowerPivot cubes automatically. Head on over to codeplex to find out more. Happy PowerPivotting.

In this post we’ll explore using SQLCLR integration to provide validation of South African Identity numbers – with the focus being slightly more on the ins and outs of CLR integration, than on how RSA ID numbers get validated. If you’re after the validation algorithm, look here . So what’s on the slab?... This solution makes RSA ID number validation possible by exposing a C# table valued function (TVF) to SQL server. The function takes an identity number as its input, and returns a single record with the following columns: IsValid                - bit: Whether the input identity number is valid. IsCitizen             - bit: Whether the number belongs to a South African citizen. Gender                - char: The gender of the individual - ‘M’ for male, ‘F’ for female. DateOfBirth        - date: The date of birth of the indivi...