Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Integration Services

Temp Tables in SSIS Data Sources

Published 2024-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword disappears in a flash:

When handing data we can make use of temporary tables to aid with separation or performance. However, they don’t always play nice with Integration Services packages.

If we set a source to call a procedure returning the contents of a temporary table we’ll see an error like below:

Read on for three options. It’s been a while, but I vaguely recall that you can use global temp tables (such as ##Results) and it will work, as those persist and are available to all sessions so long as there is some open session using them.

Leave a Comment

Working with Always Encrypted Data in SSIS

Published 2024-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards continues a series on Always Encrypted:

So now, lets see how it plays with another one of those common toolsets that you may use alongside your Encrypted data. In this post, i’ll be talking about accessing and importing data using SSIS, nothing fancy, just reading data from an Excel sheet, and piping into our Always Encrypted table, encrypting as we go.

I’m not saying to use Excel for housing confidential data either!… as no one does that…oh no, not anywhere, ever….</sarcasm>.

As previously, this focuses on using Azure Key Vault for securing Encryption keys required.

Considering that all corporate data is in Excel someplace (some variant of which may eventually become Feasel’s Second Law), of course that sensitive and confidential data will be in a plain Excel file that people e-mail around.

Comments closed

Archiving Files with SSIS

Published 2024-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword shuffles things around:

Integration workflows will typically involve handling files. As part of that we’ll need to move them around, for example moving into an archive directory.

The File System Task component can be used for a variety of operations such as creating directories or copying files. Here we’re going to look at two specific operations to help shuffle files around: Move and Rename.

Read on to see how it works and how you can turn this into an archival process for files.

Comments closed

Losing .NET Code with SSIS 2016 Package Deployment

Published 2024-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard goes on a quest:

…when one of our earliest SSIS framework customers reached out to share – in the very nicest way possible – that Fail Application on Package Failure in our SSIS framework was “not working.” My response was, “Great Scott!”

The customer is running SQL Server 2016. That’s fine for EDNA’s SSIS frameworks because we have framework versions that work with several versions of SSIS and SQL Server from 2012 forward. I maintain a collection of virtual servers built using the tools available for each version, including the operating systems and versions of Visual Studio, SSIS, and SQL Server.

Read on for the context, the story, and what Andy was able to do about it.

Comments closed

Reading Pipe-Delimited Files in SSIS

Published 2024-07-19 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low does a bit of parsing:

There was a question on the Q&A forums today, asking how to read data using SSIS, when it’s in this format:

|Col1| |Col2|Col3|Col|
|101| |A|21|DC|

One of the concerns was that there was a leading pipe. This is not a problem. When you have data like that, and you set | as the delimiter, because there are 6 delimiters, then there are 7 columns output. 

Read on for Greg’s answer. This is a big part of why I recommend people to use Parquet (or ORC, if you’re an iconoclast like I am): not needing to deal with whatever silly, arbitrary file formats people come up with.

Comments closed

SSIS Extensions in Visual Studio

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard fills us in on what’s happening in the world of Integration Services:

I’m not sure why the decision was made to “fork” development and maintenance of the Integration Services extension for Visual Studio 2022. Based upon experience with SSIS, Visual Studio, and the Microsoft SSIS team, I am confident there’s a very good reason. As one can glean from my appointment screenshot above, I save the links to both pages. The links are:

SSIS Pre-2022: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SSIS.SqlServerIntegrationServicesProjects&ssr=false#overview
SSIS 2022: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SSIS.MicrosoftDataToolsIntegrationServices

Read on to see what’s new in both of those projects.

Comments closed

Saving Sensitive Parameters in SSIS Configurations

Published 2024-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword doesn’t just leave passwords in plaintext:

Configuring SSIS projects or packages can necessitate parametering information which may include sensitive values such as authentication details. Parameters are stored as plain text in the database by default. We’ll demonstrate how to protect these values using Sensitive parameters.

Read on to learn how to make an SSIS project parameter sensitive, as well as how to use them afterward.

Comments closed

Environment Variables in SSIS

Published 2024-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword continues a series on SSIS:

Yep it’s more SSIS again this week. Here we’ll be looking at using Environment configuration within the SSIS catalog. This allows sets of parameters to be defined and used across multiple projects and packages which share common values.

This approach can either be used as a central point for configuration, or you could use multiple configurations for the same packages.

Read on for some examples of how you might use them, as well as the process to create one.

Comments closed