Category: Biml

Cathrine Wilhelmsen takes us through Biml support in Visual Studio Code:

Please note that you only get syntax highlighting with this extension. You do not get the full Biml or .NET intellisense, the BimlScript preview pane, or the ability to generate SSIS packages from Biml. For those things, you will still need BimlExpress for Visual Studio.

However! If you simply want to view your Biml files in a lightweight editor, the Biml Support extension works beautifully

It’s not full support, but it’s something.

David Stein wraps up a series on using Biml to load flat files:

Make sure you read and understand the concepts in each of the following articles before tackling this one.

– Import Biml Metadata with GetQuerySchema
– BimlScript Code Nuggets and Mad Libs
– Import Biml Metadata Directly from Excel

One of the primary issues I’ve mentioned in each of the preceding short cut steps is a lack of real automation. Since we didn’t have our metadata externalized, we needed to copy/paste some object, T-SQL file, Biml file, or Excel Spreadsheet in order to create new extracts.

The final post in the series contains quite a bit of code, too.

David Stein shows how you can take table and column data from Excel and use it to populate Biml flows:

Excel Spreadsheets as a metadata source have a lot going for them.
– Everyone uses Excel and is comfortable with it.
– Excel is incredibly customizable and versatile.
– Excel offers data validation and filtering.

For these reasons, I create customized Excel spreadsheet that function as a lite Graphic User Interface (GUI) for metadata. Of course, Excel isn’t a perfect metadata source. For one thing, you have to own a licensed copy of Excel. Second, because spreadsheets are so easy to customize, users sometimes “improve” them further and break your code.

Read on for an example.

David Stein shows how you can use the GetQuerySchema() function in Biml to retrieve metadata for a query:

This post is part of a series, Short Cuts to Biml Mastery which shows you how to learn BimlScript through a series of short cuts and remain productive while doing so.

The GetQuerySchema method provides an excellent way to import metadata from a query, in a similar way as GetDatabaseSchema imports schemas, tables, and views. GetQuerySchema was introduced last year with the 2018 editions of BimlStudio and BimlExpress.

This kind of higher-level programming takes some getting used to, but once you understand it, you can find common data access patterns and build one solution to work through many versions of the pattern.

Cathrine Wilhelmsen digs into BimlExpress 2019:

This is the first major BimlExpress release this year, called the R1 release. There are no new features in this release, but BimlExpress now supports both Visual Studio 2019 and SSIS 2019!

While there are no new features in this release of BimlExpress, there are two changes to Visual Studio that you should be aware of as a Biml developer.

Read on to see what those two changes are.

David Stein takes us through an example of what imported Biml looks like and how you can make it better:

This post is part of a series, Short Cuts to Biml Mastery which shows you how to learn BimlScript through a series of short cuts and remain productive while doing so. In the previous article, I covered how to import existing packages into Biml using BimlExpress. In this article, we’ll examine that Biml and simplify it in preparation for automation. If you’ve been reading along in this series, you’ll remember that we started with a single SSIS package which extracts data from a SQL source and creates a CSV file with quote identifiers. 

Read on to see the example and David’s first steps toward improving it.