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One of the biggest complaints about SSIS since it release in November 2005 has been its inability to load files with differing row formats. There's an infamously monster thread about it over on the SSIS forum. Hopefully some of the complains are alleviated with the release of a new delimited flat files reader on the SSIS Community samples project ...

Whilst reading SQL Tip, Compiling Your SQL Without Running It to See If It Would Run (which, I believe, is written by Denis Gobo) I was reminded of an oft forgotten feature within SSIS. It is possible to validate that your package will execute without actually executing it. Let me explain. When you execute a package then the execution engine will ...

AAAaaaaah...Yesterday was just one of those days.  I was trying to do something very simple in a script task - assign the current datetime value to one of my variables - and was pulling my stubbly hair out trying to do it. I am happy to confess to not being the strongest .netter in the world but we do also in SSIS get a pretty pony script ...

News just in… Microsoft have purchased Zoomix, a data quality software vendor. From the press release: Zoomix will contribute a critical layer of data improvement to Microsoft's SQL Server Data Platform Interesting stuff. One would think this will sit fairly and squarely within SSIS given that SSIS will be shipping Data Profiling ...

Someone emailed me today asking: I have an SSIS package that outputs data that can’t be inserted into destination tables into flat log files [JT: I presume he means that error rows are redirected to a flat file] What is the easiest way to then after processing has completed: A) Check to see whether there has been any data that could not be ...

In my blog entry Custom Logging Using Event Handlers from June 2005 I described an easy technique for using SSIS eventhandlers to get more useful logging information from your packages than using the out-of-the-box logging providers and up to now it has proved to be one of my most popular blog entries. With the introduction of the ...

  That’s what I twittered recently upon first opening up Release Candidate 0 of SQL Server 2008. You may remember that back in March of this year I told you about a new feature that would be appearing in a future CTP; namely that a container would provide information about its parent container. Hence if you peer into the depths of this ...

Whenever you run a SSIS package from the command-line you will see some output that looks similar to the following in your console window: Or preferably you'll get this:   Have you ever wondered what that phrase ''DTSER_SUCCESS (0)'' or ''DTSER_FAILURE (1)'' actually means? It seems a strange thing to have output doesn't it? Well ...

Quick note. Doug Laudenschlager (I've checked and rechecked the spelling - I think that's right :) from the SSIS team has begun a SSIS related blog at Dougbert.com (RSS feed). Doug is the technical writer on the team which means that he writes all the SSIS documentation in SQL Server Books Online. Hence, what Doug doesn't know about SSIS really ...

SQL Server 2008 is introducing some interesting querying and storage enhancements such as the introduction of spatial data and the FILESTREAM attribute on VARBINARY(MAX) columns and my thoughts have recently turned to what querying enhancements we are going to see in future versions. I was chatting to Rob Farley recently and we started to wonder ...