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I thought it would be worth publishing a list of guidelines that I see as SSIS development best practices. These are my own opinions and are based upon my experience of using SSIS over the past 18 months. I am not saying you should take them as gospel but these are generally tried and tested methods and if nothing else should serve as a basis ...

I'm working on a project at the moment that entails making calls to external DLLs from within a script task or script component. In our case the DLL in question is a web service proxy and we've been having numerous problems getting it to work. Being able to grab the errors returned from the WS has been a godsend and to do that I've come ...

As some of you may know I've been writing about SSIS on this blog for a lon-n-n-n-n-g time now. Too long it seems sometimes. In all that time though I've only had one short client engagement using the product which means that my real-world experience is somewhat limited. Studying something is all well and good but there's nothing quite like ...

The SSIS script component rocks, don't you think? I think I might have made this point before on 4 or 5, possibly a few hundred, occasions. The ability it gives you to incorporate the power of the .Net framework and your own assemblies into the SSIS pipeline can't be overstated - it puts SSIS head and shoulders above any other enterprise ...

It is generally accepted that a synchronous script component outputs the same number of rows as are input. Well I have news for you, this doesn't have to be the case. If you have a synchronous script component with multiple outputs then you can choose to send each input row to many or none of these outputs. As a result it is possible to have a ...

I'm having trouble with an aspect of SSIS and I'm not getting much joy in solving it from the SSIS forum so I'm going to post it up here instead on the off-chance that someone can help. I have a task and I want to get its execution duration by finding the difference between the start time of the task (given by ...

Here's a little titbit that I found out today. If you have a script task in your package that has PreCompileScriptIntoBinaryCode=FALSE and you then run the package from a SQL Server Agent job then the job step will fail with: ''The script files failed to load'' in the SSIS log. This is easily fixed by setting ...

UPDATE: Check out kdog's useful comments at the bottom as well! Script components can either be synchronous or asynchronous. There are a number of definitions about the difference between the two including a description that I posted back in February. I thought it would be useful to demonstrate the difference between synchronous and ...

Another quick nugget here to demonstrate Regular Expressions. For those that don't know, regular expressions are a nifty way of matching incoming textual values to a required format. Probably best that I don't try and explain it any more. Read on... One of the classic demo uses of regular expressions is to examine a UK postcode to see if it ...

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) contains some really useful logging procedures but as with most things in SSIS, it is extensible. There are 2 methods of extending the logging capability of SSIS: Build a custom log provider Use event handlers I am going to demonstrate the second of these methods - using SSIS event handlers to log to a ...