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Someone recently asked me if it was possible to dynamically set the location of a checkpoint file. Happily the answer is yes and in actual fact its something that I do all the time so that my packages can all work in conjunction with my Common Folder Structure. Of course, its all achieved with that most venerable of SSIS features, property ...

Checkpoint usage in SSIS is a topic that is not well understood at all. The mechanism for defining checkpoint files and configuring containers to use them is "fiddly" at best and isn't helped by a bug in the Sequence Container (of which you can read more about here). I hope to find the time to write a definitive article in the near ...

Checkpoint files are very useful mechanisms for recovering failed packages and I have talked about them quite a bit before, however, they do have one or two limitations. One thing that people typically want to do is always execute a particular task regardless of whether a checkpoint file exists or not. There may be a number of reasons for this - ...

Updated at the bottom Concurrent/parallel execution is not a particularly hot topic in SSIS. In the future I expect functionality to be introduced into SSIS to enable things such as spreading parallel executing tasks over multiple boxes and seperating data in the data-flow over multiple boxes. Until then though I shall sit and ...

Planning for Katmai (the next version of SQL Server) is well underway. Integration Services is still a version 1 product and as with all v1 products there are alot of improvements that can be made. I've listed a few suggestions here and here. In an attempt to try and get some of my hopes for Katmai actually into the product I've made alot of ...

For reasons that I'll save until another post, I always deploy my packages as files rather than to SQL Server. In doing this I have derived a folder structure that I use in order to keep all my deployed packages and other files in the same place:...\Root\CheckpointFiles ...\Root\Configurations ...\Root\ErrorFiles ...\Root\Logs ...

I thought it would be worth publishing a list of guidelines that I see as SSIS development best practices. These are my own opinions and are based upon my experience of using SSIS over the past 18 months. I am not saying you should take them as gospel but these are generally tried and tested methods and if nothing else should serve as a basis ...

There's a few other things to be aware about when using checkpoint files that BOL does not tell you. Some of these may be obvious but its worth stating them anyway.: An OnPreExecute event on the package will not execute if the package is restarted using a checkpoint file (Proof is here: ...

What are checkpoints? SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) contains a fantastic new feature called Checkpoints which enables us to restart a package from a previous point of failure rather than run the package from the start. Details about a package's execution are stored in a checkpoint file which will be read upon the next execution so that ...