Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Integration Services

Dealing with Optional Carriage Returns in SSIS

Published 2025-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword has fun with file formats:

When ingesting files in SSIS via Flat File Connections, a consistent format is key. Sometimes that isn’t the case. Here we’ll look at an example where the carriage return (CR, \r) may or may not be included in the file.

Pepperidge Farms remembers back in the day when Windows, MacOS, and Linux (or any flavor of UNIX for that matter) each had a different way of ending a line: line feed, carriage return, or both. And of course most tools weren’t smart enough to figure out which your particular text file followed and display it correctly.

Leave a Comment

Debugging SSIS Packages

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword wrote code with an error in it:

When constructing or investigating a SSIS package we can run into a variety of issues. To help resolve there are various techniques which can be used to troubleshoot the package.

Whilst we have the Progress tab for the package to tell us what’s happened during execution, it’s usually more effective to debug packages in flight. Below we’ll look at a few ways we can achieve this:

Never having written code that doesn’t work perfectly the first time, this post is, of course, merely academic for all of us perfect developers. But for those people who may have let a little something sneak in or have to deal with the errors that others have seeded into our beautiful programs, Andy provides three separate techniques for troubleshooting packages in flight.

Leave a Comment

REPLACENULL in SSIS versus DT_DBTIMESTAMP2 Columns

Published 2025-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin notes an error:

 Using the “REPLACENULL” functionality frequently in the “Derived Column” component, the “Conditional Split” component, and other places in SSIS where formulas can be applied is common.

However, I recently encountered an issue with the “DT_DBTIMESTAMP2” data type.

The following formula produced an error:

REPLACENULL(TestDt, (DT_DBTIMESTAMP2,7)”1900-01-01 00:00:00.0000000″)

Error: 0xC020902A at Test Transformation, Derived Column [2]: The “Derived Column” failed because truncation occurred, and the truncation row disposition on “Derived Column.Outputs[Derived Column Output].Columns[TestDt]” specifies failure on truncation. A truncation error occurred on the specified object of the specified component.

Read on for an explanation and two alternatives.

Comments closed

SSIS: Operating Completed with Problems Logged

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin uses Integration Services to process an Analysis Services cube:

If you process SSAS cubes via SSIS packages you might notice a weird message like “Full Processing:Warning: Server: Operation completed with XXX problems logged.“

How you can get that message (if you have that problem):

Slava notes that the simple solution doesn’t actually work, as both services decide not to store that information. But Slava does provide a solution to the problem.

Comments closed

Case-Sensitive Elements in SQL Server Integration Services

Published 2025-01-30 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword has a list:

Case sensitivity in data can trip us up unknowingly and Integration Services is no exception. Depending on the components we’re using we may notice different behaviour.

Without understanding the way case sensitivity is treated within SSIS packages, we may see unexpected results with string comparisons.

Let’s clear things up and dive into a few examples to see when they behave differently.

Click through for three examples. One more that I’d add is Script components, which are C# or VB. Both of the languages are case sensitive, and string comparison in .NET is case sensitive unless you set StringComparison to one of the options that ignore case.

Comments closed

SSIS Deprecating Microsoft Connector for Oracle

Published 2025-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Debbi Lyons has an announcement:

In July 2025, Microsoft will discontinue support for the Microsoft Connector for Oracle in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). This blog provides essential details to help customers prepare for this change in advance.

The Microsoft Connector for Oracle enables data export from and import into Oracle databases within an SSIS package. This feature, available in Enterprise editions of SQL Server 2019 and 2022, will remain functional for the lifecycle of the SQL Server product. However, support for this feature will officially end on July 4, 2025. With the deprecation, future product releases will provide no further bug fixes. Additionally, it will not be supported from SQL Server 2025 and onwards.

See, and people have told us there hasn’t been anything happening in SSIS since 2016!

The alternative of using ADO.NET reminds me of when Microsoft tried to take OLEDB out of Integration Services and got the pushback that no, we really don’t want to move from a fast component to a slow component. I would expect much less pushback on this one, simply because I doubt many people are using SSIS to ferry around data in Oracle.

Comments closed

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.

Comments closed

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

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