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Its been a long-g-g-g-g time since I did a SSIS-related post so here’s a little ditty that I picked up while reviewing some internal stuff today. Editing SSIS configuration (i.e. .dtsConfig) files isn’t particularly easy. Most people I see who try to do this use a traditional text editor like Notepad but that isn’t a great experience because the ...

In my current day job I’m doing a lot of work against an Oracle back-end and I’ve just come across a situation where I need to do some string aggregation. Effectively I needed to turn this: Parent Child Charles William Charles Harry Anne Peter Anne Zara Andrew Beatrice Andrew Eugenie into ...

[Although I colloquially refer to myself on this blog as “SSIS Junkie” it won’t have escaped the notice of regular readers that I haven’t been talking about SSIS much lately, in fact nothing of real substance in regard to SSIS has appeared here since Nesting variables to calculate values on 24th October. The reason for that is that I simply ...

I was looking over a package today that a colleague had built and it contained the following code in a Script Task that was being used to return today’s day name: Public Sub Main() ' Dim sWeekday As String sWeekday = Now().DayOfWeek.ToString Dts.Variables(''User::DayName'').Value = sWeekday ...

Someone emailed me today asking: I have an SSIS package that outputs data that can’t be inserted into destination tables into flat log files [JT: I presume he means that error rows are redirected to a flat file] What is the easiest way to then after processing has completed: A) Check to see whether there has been any data that could not be ...

In the past I have advocated (and still do advocate) the use of a user variable in SSIS packages to store the path to a folder on the hard drive; I always use a variable called @[User::RootFolder] for this. Having this path available within a package variable enables you to dynamically set the location of files that your package may reference ...

Very short blog post this one. A guy on the SSIS Forum recently wanted to add a new GUID into the pipeline and was pertubed that there was no equivalent of T-SQL's NEWID() function in the SSIS Expression Language with which to do it. I agree that there SHOULD be a function to do it and I hope that one will one day appear. In ...

An interesting problem has been posed on the SSIS forum at SQL Server Central. The user wants to download a file containing stock information from Yahoo finance and import the data into a database table.   That sounded like an interesting problem so I took up the challenge. The basis of my solution uses the code that Ashvini ...

Did you know.... ...that you can run regular SQL Server transactions in SSIS over multiple tasks without requiring the use of Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC)? Well I didn't but thanks to that man again, Kirk Haselden, I do now. The default behaviour of a Connection Manager is that every task has its own connection which is why they ...