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7 days ago I posted a blog entry called Storing Passwords in which I explained the various options for securely storing passwords in a SSIS configuration. The securest form of doing this is storing them in an encrypted fashon in a SQL Server table although I didn't go into detail on how you might do this.   Well, now I have no need to ...

Many questions on the SSIS forum relate to security aspects of using SSIS and a large percentage of those relate to the storing of passwords in configurations. Many people have correctly observed that, whilst SSIS will generate configuration files for you, it will not include passwords, instead leaving them blank. The reason is simple, ...

As anyone who has been using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for a while will know there are lots and lots of knobs within a package that can be tweaked to alter behaviour. Many of these aren't obvious and the steep learning curve that many people attribute to SSIS education is, in my opinion, down to knowing about these little nuances ...

A comment here from Evan made me realise that there doesn't really exist a good reference for property paths in SSIS. Property paths are used in configurations and the /SET option of dtexec.exe to set properties in the package dynamically at runtime. For some inexplicable reason dtexecui.exe does not contain a user interface for building ...

I've had an idea about how I'd like to use connection managers, variables, and consequently, configurations and its quite a diversion from how I manage these object types in SSIS currently. Quite simply I'm toying with the idea of storing all my connection strings in variables and then using expressions to apply those connection ...

There's a really good post here by Davide Mauri explaining the order in which "things" happen when a package spins up. By "things" I mean logging starting, reading configurations, validation and control-flow execution. Logging With SSIS: Beware of Parent Package Variable ...

I have just been watching Joy Mundy's webcast "Loading a Kimball method data warehouse using SQL Server Integration Services". I highly recommend it - Joy has done great job in outlining the basic skeleton for loading a data warehouse and covers some valuable concepts such as:Using a parent-child package structure (or master-child as ...

Here is the next in my series of posts explaining how common tasks in DTS can now be implemented in SSIS. Passing a parameter from a parent package to a child package In DTS, packages could execute other packages by use of the Execute Package Task. Values could be passed between these packages using the Inner Variables and Outer ...

Here is the next in my series of posts explaining how common tasks in DTS can now be implemented in SSIS.   Changing connections using a Dynamic Properties Task DTS2000 introduced the popular, and very powerful, Dynamic Properties Task. This task enabled the package developer to make a DTS package what we term ''location ...

I have spoken previously about indirect configurations and tried to convince everyone of how useful they are. I noticed something today concerning indirect configurations that quite surprised me. If you execute a package that uses an indirect configuration and the environment variable is not present you get the following warning: The ...