A few days ago I was alerted to a peculiarity of SSIS’s Script Component that I believe people need to be aware of. Its a peculiarity that can rear its head when your script component is synchronous and has multiple outputs. Here’s an example of a dataflow that contains such a component: Some things to note about this dataflow that you ...

A question on the SSIS forum earlier today asked: I need to dynamically unpivot some set of columns in my source file. Every month there is one new column and its set of Values. I want to unpivot it without editing my SSIS packages that is deployed Let’s be clear about what we mean by Unpivot. It is a normalisation technique that basically ...

I saw a question on MSDN’s SSIS forum the other day that went something like this: I’m loading data into a table from a flat file but I want to be able to store the name of that file as well. Is there a way of doing that? I don’t want to come across as disrespecting those who took the time to reply but there was a few answers along the ...

Often when using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) you will find there is more than one way of accomplishing a task and that the most obvious method of doing so might not be the optimal one. In the video below I demonstrate this by way of an experiment using SSIS’s Flat File Source component; I show different ways that you can pull data from ...

In this, my latest video nugget, I demonstrate and compare three ways that you can insert data into a SQL Server table from the SSIS DataFlow: OLE DB Destination without Fast Load OLE DB Destination with Fast Load SQL Server Destination The demo peels back the covers to see how these three methods actually ...

The last video nugget that I produced seemed to be fairly well received so I thought I would attempt a few more; and indeed, here is the next one. In this video I demonstrate a simple technique for outputting data to an XML file using SSIS’s Script Task. The video is 8m22s long and is embedded below however I’m aware of some problems that we ...

Earlier today while surfing the SSIS forum on MSDN I noticed a question that asked how one could execute a series of .sql files using SSIS. One suggested approach was to read the contents of the file(s) into a variable using a Script Task and then execute the contents of that variable using an Execute SQL Task. Well, that would work but there is ...

A few weeks ago I published a blog entitled Collecting information about your SSIS packages which demonstrated a way that you could use T-SQL and XQuery to derive information about your SSIS packages. Since then I’ve made a few amendments to the script that accompanied that blog post as follows: New columns The collected data now includes the ...

Did you know that is is possible to read the contents of a SSIS package (i.e. a .dtsx file) from within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) using T-SQL? For example, take the following T-SQL snippet: select cast(BulkColumn as XML)from openrowset(bulk 'C:\tmp\MyPkg.dtsx', single_blob) as pkgColumn; It uses OPENROWSET ...

Precedence constraints are one of the most oft used features of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) but also often one of the most overlooked. In this blog post I’ll cover a couple of things that you might not know about them. The basics Most people typically use precedence constraints like this, with a green arrow: A green arrow here ...