I recently stumbled across a nuance of the SSIS expression language which, when you think about, kinda make sense – but it does help to be aware of it. Its concerned with casting of datetime values using the SSIS expression language Take the following expression: (DT_WSTR,30) @[System::ContainerStartTime] That expression casts a datetime ...

This is something I’ve been meaning to blog about for ages but it kept slipping my mind, sorry about that! Wee Hyong Tok from the SSIS product team has built a slide deck that covers some of the deep secrets about SSIS2012 including: Catalog deep dive Security Low level monitoring and troubleshooting The slide deck is available to ...

v1.0.2.0 – what’s in it? Things have been a bit quiet on the sp_ssiscatalog front since I last blogged about it three months ago in December 2012. Rest-assured development continues apace however and today I’m making available a minor update, v1.0.2.0 which is now available for download from Codeplex. For those that don’t know I describe ...

Hugo Tap asked me on Twitter earlier today whether or not there existed a SSIS Dataflow Destination component that enabled one to MERGE data into a table rather than INSERT it. Its a common request so I thought it might be useful to summarise the current state of play as regards a MERGE destination for SSIS. Firstly, there is no MERGE destination ...

I was checking my Twitter feed on my way in to work this morning and was alerted to an interesting blog post by Valentino Vranken that highlights a problem regarding the OLE DB Source in SSIS. In short, using double-dash comments in SQL statements within the OLE DB Source can cause unexpected results. It really is quite an important read if you’re ...

13 days ago I wrote a blog post entitled Introducing sp_ssiscatalog (v1.0.0.0) in which I first made mention of sp_ssiscatalog, an open source stored procedure intended to make it easy to query the SSIS Catalog. I have been working on some enhancements since then and hence v1.0.1.0 is now available for download from Codeplex. What’s new in this ...

I’ve been working on a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) solution for about 6 months now and I’ve learnt many many things that I intend to share on this blog just as soon as I get the time. Here’s a very short starter-for-ten… I’ve found the following query to be utterly invaluable when interrogating the SSIS Catalog to discover what is ...

My buddy Sutha Thiru sent me an email recently asking about my opinion on a particular nuance of the project deployment model in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012 and I’d like to share my response as I think it warrants a wider discussion. Sutha asked: Jamie What is your take on this? ...

This is a heads-up for anyone doing development on SSIS. On my current project where we are implementing a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012 solution we recently encountered a situation where we were unable to deploy any of our projects even though we had successfully deployed in the past. Any attempt to use the deployment wizard ...

FYI. The Balanced Data Distributor component for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has proved to be a useful tool for increasing execution performance of SSIS data flows by parallelizing the computation across CPUs. As of today a version has been released for SSIS 2012, get it from Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services ...