Once upon a time I blogged at http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson but that ended in August 2009 when I left EMC. There is a lot of (arguably) valuable content over there however certain events in the past leave me concerned that that content is not well cared for and I don't have any confidence that it will still exist in the long ...

Once upon a time I blogged at http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson but that ended in August 2009 when I left EMC. There is a lot of valuable content over there however certain events in the past leave me concerned that that content is not well cared for and I don't have any confidence that it will still exist in the long term. Hence, I ...

I saw an interesting question on the SSIS MSDN forum yesterday where someone was asking how to do a cartesian product (i.e. a CROSS JOIN) in a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) dataflow. Links were provided to various articles that cover this (see Performing a Cross Join (Cartesian Product) in SSIS which explains how you can fool the Merge ...

One question that I have been asked a few times of late in regard to performance tuning SSIS data flows is this: Why isn’t the Merge Join output sorted (i.e.IsSorted=True)? This is a fair question. After all both of the Merge Join inputs are sorted, hence why wouldn’t the output be sorted as well? Well here’s a little secret, the Merge Join ...

Earlier this evening I posted a blog post entitled Investigation: Can different combinations of components effect Dataflow performance? where I compared the performance of three different dataflows all working to the same overall goal. I wanted to make one last point related to the results but I thought it warranted a blog post all of its ...

Introduction The Dataflow task is one of the core components (if not the core component) of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and often the most misunderstood. This is not surprising, its an incredibly complicated beast and we’re abstracted away from that complexity via some boxes that go yellow red or green and that have some lines drawn ...

I saw a thread on the SSIS forum today that went something like this: I have the following dataset: AccountNo Date DailyMovement 00000001 28/08/2010 10 00000001 29/08/2010 5 00000001 ...

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 ...

It is pretty much accepted by SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) developers that synchronous transformations are generally quicker than asynchronous transformations (for a description of synchronous and asynchronous transformations go read Asynchronous and synchronous data flow components). Notice I said “generally” and not “always”; there are ...

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 ...