Yesterday I was on the lookout for a free tool that would help me write XPath statements. I put a shout out on Twitter and Johan Barnard replied saying : Give XMLPad a try http://www.wmhelp.com/xmlpad3.htm I’m sure there are legions of developers out there that know all about XMLPad but I had never heard about it so I suspect some of you ...

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 ...

During the XML Optimization presentation today I'll refer back to the sample code posted at http://www.apress.com/book/downloadfile/4021.  I'll also update this post with additional sample code by tomorrow. UPDATE: The PowerPoint presentation and sample code are attached to this post in the ZIP file. Jacob Sebastian's book ''The Art of ...