blogs.conchango.com

SSIS uses absolute paths to point to objects on the file system. What does that mean? In short it means that in order to point to a file I would have to use the full absolute path, I couldn't give a path that is relative to where the packages resides. A common complaint about SSIS is that it does not allow the use of relative paths. The most ...

A question I quite often see on the SSIS forum is: Is there a way to delete a group of files within a directory? ie: I want to delete all files in directorty c:\logs\*.txt (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3196521&SiteID=1) Well its actually quite easy, you just need  ForEach Loop container and the FileSystem Task. ...

Back in February and March I wrote a series of blog entries explaining how to use the various profile requests in the new Data Profiling Task that is coming in SSIS 2008. All of those blog entries explained how to profile some data and analyse it offline using the Data Profile Viewer which is all well and good but quite often you need to use the ...

As SQL Server 2008 is practically now a done deal my thoughts have turned to what will come in future versions. One feature I would like is something I'm notionally calling ''package parts''. Let me explain. Today in SSIS we build, distribute and execute these things called packages. Packages are fairly large, verbose, non-descript BLOBs and that ...

Next Monday (14th April) brings with it the start of the Microsoft MVP Summit 2008. This is an opportunity for all of the (give or take a few) 4000 MVPs from around the world to travel to Seattle and engage with Microsoft product teams with a view to helping them improve their products. Someone somewhere has deigned that I have the honour of being ...

In the past few days I have twice received some good news about small enhancements that are making it into katmai.  Here's the first one: Output config info to the output window Request: I have recently inherited some packages from someone else. In trying to figure out what they actually do I was getting foxed because configurations ...

There was some great news this week for SSIS developers that are building solutions involving databases other than SQL Server; Microsoft will, later this year, be releasing new connectors for Oracle, Teradata and SAP BW. Check out Darvey Lavender's announcement on the SSIS connectivity wiki or read Matt Masson's blog entry for more details. I ...

Its a commonly held belief that the Lookup component cache has to be populated from a relational source.  Well, that's true, but there is a pretty handy workaround. SQL Server 2005 introduced the OPENROWSET(BULK) command which can return the contents of a file as a recordset hence something like the following will successfully populate the ...

In this blog entry I am going to outline the function of the Value Inclusion profile request in the new Data Profiling Task in SQL Server 2008. BOL states about this profile request: Computes the overlap in the values between two columns or sets of columns. This profile can determine whether a column or set of columns is appropriate to serve ...

In this blog entry I am going to outline the function of the Candidate Key profile request in the new Data Profiling Task in SQL Server 2008. BOL states about this profile request: Reports whether a column or set of columns is a key, or an approximate key, for the selected table. This profile also helps you identify problems in your data, ...