BI Stack Dependency Tracker

lucazav

I'm working on a BI project. It'd be very interesting to use an evolution of Dependency Tracker (e.g. BI Dependency Tracker) that is able to track all the dependencies beetwen SQL Engine, SSIS, SSAS and SSRS.
According to some naming convention you can set in, it'd be very useful to group all these related object in customizable layers like 'Staging', 'DWH' and so on...
Today we miss such an instrument to document our BI projects.

Thank you!

Sian.Williams

Thanks for your comments.

This has already been requested by other users, it has been logged as DT-577 if you wish to chase it up in the future.

I will add your comments to the request

Thanks

lucazav

This has already been requested by other users, it has been logged as DT-577 if you wish to chase it up in the future.

Is there a public requests repository so that I can browse other users requests?

Thank you so much.

Nick Sutherland

Hi,
Thanks for your interest in Red Gate. We are investigating the BI sector at the moment so your Dependency Tracker request is very welcome. It would be very helpful if you could describe how you use the Microsoft BI tools and if there are other areas where you think Red Gate could make these more useful.

Thanks
Nick

lucazav

Hi Nick,

basically we start to load/transform data from the ERP system through several databases (Helper, Config, Staging) and

finally all the cleansed data is stored in the Datawarehouse database. So we have some SSIS packages between these db
that do the "dirty" work; we also can have SSIS packages that move/transform data into the same db.
We also create SSAS databases and SSRS reports based on the Datawarehouse db.
All this work is based on an Adaptive BI Framework, the rules of which will be described by my collegue Davide Mauri in a
website (http://www.engineeringbi.com, work in progress).

It'd be nice to have a tool that traces all the dependencies between all the objects of the BI stack.
E.g. starting from a dimension in a SSAS database, this tool will trace all the dependencies down to the staging database
table (passing through SSIS packages that may occur between objects, views or stored procedures, etc. etc.). Even parsing of SSIS SQL Tasks (in general of all SQL Commands) should be traced.
You should be able to group selected objects into logical layers. After you select one or more layers, or independent
objects in this tool, you'd be able to export a dependencies matrix of selected layers/object in Excel, or an XML file containing these dependencies.

More features like these can be implemented in order to facilitate the BI developer daily work. But I think the ones upon described are the most important.
Let me know by personal e-mail if you need further help.

Thank you

Zhah001

Hi,

I am new to SQL dependency tracker. The tool shows dependencies between the objects.
Is there any way we can find the objects which are not dependent to any other object and vice versa, so we can delete them?

Thanks,