Category: Integration Services

Slava Murygin shows how to use project parameters and expressions to make SSIS packages a bit more dynamic:

Being on SSIS presentation recently, I’ve realized that a lot of people, who are working with SSIS for years, still do not know what “Parameterizing” is and how to do it.

SSIS has been changed a lot in SQL Server 2012, where Microsoft announced “Project Deployment Model”. Since then you can deploy Project, and you can assign Parameters to that project, which can be passed to it for execution. Before that, developers used Configurations to supply values for internal variables and connections.

Adding parameters to packages grants you a huge level of flexibility when moving between environments or reusing components.

Matt Cushing gives us some notes on learning SSIS:

Send Mail tasks won’t work unless you have things configured properly.  I was trying to find things on google and all I kept coming across was how to configure the task or how to Install SSIS and configure it to run, not how to configure the server to send it properly.  Thankfully John took pity on me and helped me realize that using an execute SQL task and sp_send_dbmail works more easily and cleanly – Sql Server Central

I’ve used Send Mail a few times, but have always had somebody else around to configure Exchange or whatever other mail server we were using at the time.

Koen Verbeeck has some initial thoughts on using 2016 in a POC:

• AutoAdjustBufferSize property of the SSIS data flow. Done with manually setting the Buffer Size and Buffer Max Rows. Just set this property to true and the data flow takes care of its own performance.

• Custom logging levels in the SSIS Catalog. Now I can finally define a logging level that only logs errors and warnings AND set it as the server-wide default level.

• The DROP TABLE IF EXISTS syntax. The shorter the code, the better 🙂

I was initially a bit concerned with AutoAdjustBufferSize because I figured I could do a better job of selecting buffer size.  Maybe on the margin I might be able to, but I think I’m going to give it a try.

Matt Smith ran into an SSIS error on a new laptop:

So today I went to run a SSIS package on my new laptop and bam, error message.

Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.DtsRuntimeException: The package failed to load due to error 0xC0011008 “Error loading from XML. No further detailed error information can be specified for this problem because no Events object was passed where detailed error information can be stored.”. This occurs when CPackage::LoadFromXML fails.

This feels like one of those types of errors that you spend 3 hours trying to figure out.  Gotta love machine rebuild errors…

Terry McCann shows how to use the Google distance matrix API to calculate a distance from a starting point to an ending point:

The most basic use is to calculate the distance from A to B. This is what we will look at using SSIS. The API takes in an origin and a destination. These can either be a lat & lng combo or an address which we be translated into Lat & lng when executed. To demonstrate the process I have created a database and loaded it with some sample customer and store data. We have 2 customers and 4 stores. These customers are linked to different stores. You can download the example files at the bottom of the page.

I like that this shows just how easy it is to hit an API with an SSIS component.  If I had one wish with this article, I’d use Biml to generate the package rather than talking through the tasks and components.  Regardless, check this out; it’s a great use of the script component.

Jon Morisi shows how to scrape a website and load the result into a SQL Server table:

Next save this as a csv file.

Now jump into SQL Server Management Studio, drill down to your database (you may want to create a new, empty database for your snarfing), right-click and start the Import and Export wizard, via “Import Data”:

This is the one-off solution.  If you need to do it regularly, read up on creating scrapers and use Integration Services to load.