Category: Integration Services

Andy Leonard takes us through a new feature in Visual Studio:

A new feature in version 3.9 of the Visual Studio 2019 SSIS extension is “skip package validation.” I’ve tested the functionality and it works well. Here’s how you set it up:

Click through to see how easy it is to enable. I’d imagine that this would work really well when dealing with dynamic packages where connection details aren’t available until runtime. Waiting for validation to fail to connect to a remote data source (on the UI thread!) was always annoying.

Mark Broadbent reviews a SQLBits talk:

Yes before you say it, I know SQL Server Integration Services is “old technology” but a lot of people are still using it, and in many cases are either still developing against it, or are looking to integrate/ migrate with other burgeoning technologies such as Azure Data Factory. In other words, if you are not currently using SSIS then this post is probably not for you -otherwise read on.

If you are still one of the lucky ones to still be using SSIS, I thought it would be worth publishing these comprehensive notes taken from a session titled “SSIS Data Flow Performance Tuning” delivered at SQLBits 8 (Brighton) by the then “SSIS guru” Jamie Thomson. Notes have timings (in mins and seconds) against them, which correlate directly with the presentation times. The video is still available and can be downloaded from the SQLBits website so you can watch it (if required) and use the timings to follow along.

It’s an asynchronous watch party with Mark.

Tim Mitchell appeases the masses:

A few years back, I wrote a blog post about using an SSIS object variable as a data flow source. In that post, I described how you could load a set of query results into an object-typed variable in SQL Server Integration Services and then use that in-memory data as a source within a data flow. In the comments and the feedback I got on that post, the same question kept coming up: what is the process for reusing a recordset in an SSIS object variable in the same package?

In this post, I’ll show how you can modify the scripts within your SSIS package to allow reprocessing of the same set of results in an object variable.

Tim has a nice workaround for the problem, so check it out.

Tim Mitchell shows us different options available when formatting SSIS packages:

Most folks I know go to one extreme or the other when it comes to the visual layout of SQL Server Integration Services packages: either they don’t care a tiny bit about the appearance, or they insist on an easy-to-read layout before a project is considered complete. I am definitely in the second group, and will almost always spend the time to make sure my packages are properly laid out.

Regardless of which of these groups you are in, it is very easy to apply some simple visual formatting to your packages. In this quick tip, I’ll show you how to use the visual formatting options in SSIS to automate the layout.

I consider it quite important—it gives a future viewer an idea of your vision as developer. If I can’t read what you’re doing, that does not bode well.