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Its possible that at some point when building SSIS packages that you will want to initialise a variable with some value at execution time and the most obvious way of doing this is to use a script task. That code would look something like the following: Public Sub Main() Dim vars As Variables ...

A question I quite often see on the SSIS forum is: Is there a way to delete a group of files within a directory? ie: I want to delete all files in directorty c:\logs\*.txt (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3196521&SiteID=1) Well its actually quite easy, you just need  ForEach Loop container and the FileSystem Task. ...

A question was recently asked on the SSIS forum about how you can put a package "to sleep". In other words, pause execution for a defined length of time. It was suggested to use a script task to do this. That would definately work but there is actually a much easier way - use an empty For Loop. Here's a screenshot showing ...

Quite often you may want to process data from multiple files all at the same time. There are a number of options available to you if you want to do this. 1. Have a seperate source adapter for each file and amalgamate them together with the Union All component. Advantages of this approach: This works well if the files are of ...

I've noticed a few people on the SSIS forum lately asking about expressions on the Foreach Loop. They are aware that its possible to set expressions on properties of the Foreach container but are flummoxed when it comes to setting expressions on the properties of the enumerators themselves. That's understandable because the properties ...

I have just arrived home from an excellent BI-flavoured meeting of Tony Rogerson's UK SQL Server User Group. Aside from some great content the thing I love about these events is the change to meet up with people from around the BI community - people that I've met both in person and online in the past few years.So Rastko Petrovic, Mat Stephen, ...

Whilst reading posts on the SSIS forum of late it has become evident that people are unaware of the power that expressions can provide within an SSIS package. This is understandable - alot of people are starting to use SSIS now but expressions aren't the most obvious feature. So what are they? Well the most generic explanation is that ...

Peter (sorry, don't know your surname) made a very good comment here: http://blogs.conchango.com/jamiethomson/archive/2006/02/20/2895.aspx#2903 that data-flows in a ForEach loop carry out repeated SELECTs against a data source and it would be good to be able to cache that data rather than executing the same query over and over. Its a great ...

Here is the first in what will hopefully be a long series of postings in what I have colloquially called my SSIS Nuggets series. I was reading a post this morning from Sam Bendayan in which he was pondering how to store a full result set returned from the Execute SQL Task. He had followed BOL (which according to Sam states that a Full Result Set ...

Someone recently asked on a newsgroup how they could grab hold of a value from a given field in the last row of a file. For example, in the file depicted below we would like to grab the value ''Posh''. I figured this might be a fairly common requirement so figured I'd put something together to show how to do this. There's  probably a number ...