SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is shaping up to be a great product but there's still some things it doesn't do that I'd like to see in there.
Configuration files are used to dynamically change properties of your packages/tasks/connections etc... at runtime. This is particularly useful for when you want to move a solution between environments....instead of changing the connections in your packages all you have to do is change the property in your configuration file and all your packages can dynamically pick up the environment settings...hey presto, all your packages are operating on the new environment...all by changing 1 file. Thats very powerful functionality.
However, at the moment configuration files are read-only at runtime. It would be nice to be able to write out data items to a configuration file so that I can use them next time around. For example...I'm loading data out of a source table and each day I only want the new or altered data. If, on a daily basis, I could store the max timestamp on my extracted data in a configuration file I could pick that value up the next day and use it in my extraction to only pick up the delta recordset. I've been in contact with the dev team about this and they say a few poeple have requested this functionality and they are considering it for the next release - good news.
In the meantime, there is a workaround. Raw files are provided to enable you to land data out to disk and easily use it again later. The data in the files is in a proprietary format so essentially they're not useful to other applications. In the example above I could write out my max timestamp value to a raw file, load it in next time using the Raw Source File Adapter and use the MERGE JOIN component to join that value with my dataset.
- Jamie