File-based ETL is usually dull. Most systems generate (or expect to consume) files that are delimited, with a common field separator such as comma, tab, or pipe. However, occasionally you’ll get an oddly formatted file with an unusual delimiter. Although it’s not obvious in the Visual Studio designer, SSIS is capable of consuming and generating files with custom delimiters. In…
Last week I hosted a webinar in which I reviewed some of the coming changes for SQL Server Integration Services in SQL Server 2016. The current beta of SSIS 2016 has some exciting new features that I think you’ll like. The recording of that webinar is below. Enjoy!
If you are looking for some end-of-year training before the new budget year rolls around, consider joining Andy Leonard and me in the Washington, DC area for our 4-day Advanced SSIS classroom training course. This course will be held December 7-10 in Reston, VA (just outside of DC). I’ve recorded a brief intro below to give you a glimpse into…
I’m happy to announce a new, full-day class in the Dallas area next month. I’ll be presenting my Building Better SSIS Packages course on Friday, October 2nd at the Microsoft campus in Irving, Texas. This course is a preconference seminar for SQL Saturday Dallas, which will be held in Arlington, Texas the following day (October 3). Registration is open for…
If you’ve used SSIS for any significant amount of time, you’ve almost certainly run into this roadblock: You need to download a file stored on an SFTP (secure FTP) server, but connecting to SFTP with SSIS is not natively supported. There is a built-in FTP task in Integration Services, but it is very limited in its functionality and will not…
Without a doubt, the most versatile data flow tool in the SSIS arsenal is the script component. This control grants ETL developers complete control over the flow of data, leverages the full power of the .NET Framework namespaces, and can be used as a source, destination, or transformation in data flow operations. Within the script logic, one can perform complex…
Earlier this week, I confirmed two full-day seminars I’ll be delivering in conjunction with SQL Saturday events this fall. I’ve got a brand new course entitled “Building Better SSIS Packages” which I’ll be delivering in Denver and Boston. Here’s a brief into to this course: SQL Server Integration Services is deceptively easy to use. With a few hours of instruction…
During data load or transformation processes, capturing a distinct row number for incoming data can be beneficial for the ETL process itself, as well as for use in the destination database. Having an arbitrary, incrementing row number assigned to each row can help to determine the order in which the rows of data were processed, and can provide a unique…
In my most recent post in this series, I talked about how to use the SSIS object variable as an ADO recordset as a source in a data flow. By loading the result set of a query into this variable, the contents of the variable can be read by an SSIS script component and sent out through the SSIS pipeline….
Object variables in SSIS are incredibly versatile, allowing the storage of almost any type of data (even .NET objects). In my last post on this topic, I demonstrated how an SSIS object variable containing a .NET DataSet object could be used by the for each loop container as an iterator. In this post, I’ll continue the discussion by showing how…