My mind was wandering today after reading Andy Leonard's excellent post Name Those Connections and it occurred to me that due to SQL Server 2012 including an SSIS Server there may be an opportunity to leverage Policy-Based Management (PBM) for ensuring adherance to an organisation's best practises around SSIS development. I have absolutely no idea ...

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 term. ...

Ever since I started writing SSIS packages back in 2004 I have opted to store configurations in .dtsConfig (.i.e. XML) files rather than in a SQL Server table (aka SQL Server Configurations) however recently I inherited some packages that used SQL Server Configurations and thus had to immerse myself in their murky little world. To all the people ...

Just recently I've inherited some SSIS packages that were in dire need of fixing however, as is often the case, most of my battles were with connection string configurations. It always baffles me when I see packages that don't log information that would be useful for debugging purposes and when its me that has to debug those packages I tend to ...

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 ...

One of the biggest complaints I see developers raising about SSIS since it was released in 2005 is that the only way to debug Script Components is the distinctly simplistic and old fashioned method of sticking up message boxes - there is no way to step through the code as it executes (something that Microsoft developers have ...

In December 2010 I announced in a blog post Introducing SSIS Reporting Pack for SQL Server code-named Denali that I planned to provide a series of reports that visualised information held in the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server Denali – I called these reports the SSIS Reporting Pack. At that time SSIS Reporting Pack was a precursor to what I really ...

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 ...

Just a short post here to let you know that the SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) product team recently invited me to contribute a blog post about authoring reports for SSIS in Denali for their team blog. I was of course only too happy to accept and yesterday that blog post was published at Report Authoring on the SSIS Catalog, so if you are ...

In my blog post SSIS Server, Catalogs, Environments & Environment Variables in SSIS in Denali from November 2010 I alluded to forthcoming enhancements in the logging infrastructure when I said: One final note on logging. The fairly limited information that gets captured in the current CTP is not the same as what will be in the product upon ...