I recently noticed that Red Gate have launched themselves into the SSIS component market by releasing a new Data Cleanser component, albeit in beta for now. It seems to be quite a simple component, bringing together several features that you can find elsewhere, but with a suitable level  polish that you’d expect from them. String operations include find and replace with regular expressions, case formatting and trim, all of which are available today in one form or another, but will the RedGate factor appeal to people? Benefits include ease of use, all operations in one place, versus ... [More]

SQLBits 9 has now been announced as 29th September to 1st October 2011 at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. This will follow the now familiar three day format, a training day, and two full days of concurrent sessions. Saturday 1st October will of course be the free community day. Despite growing the event quite dramatically over the past four years, this is something we are all very proud to have maintained and is a key factor when planning the events. Plenty of more info to come, but in the meantime session submission is now open so why not submit an abstract?

This is a quick walk through on how you can use the Script Component to perform Conditional Split like behaviour, splitting your data across multiple outputs. We will use C# code to decide what does flows to which output, rather than the expression syntax of the Conditional Split transformation. Start by setting up the source. For my example the source is a list of SQL objects from sys.objects, just a quick way to get some data: SELECT type, name FROM sys.objects type name S syssoftobjrefs F FK_Message_Pa... [More]

Here are the slides from my session SSIS Field Notes presented at SQLBits 7 in York earlier this month - SSIS Field Notes – Darren Green.pptx On a similar theme, the video of my session Design patterns for SSIS Performance from is now available. You heard it here first! I know that this because I’ve only just finished updating the SQLBits site with all the videos from SQLBits 6. Hopefully we’ll get them released quicker for SQLBits 7.

In case you haven't heard we are planning the next SQL Bits event, and today we have released the agenda for Friday & Saturday, a total of 50 sessions covering all aspects of SQL Server with a great selection of speakers. http://www.sqlbits.com/information/Agenda.aspx From our recent announcement - ...SQLBits 7 will take place over three days from Thursday September 30th to Saturday October 2nd in York. Day one will be a training day, featuring in-depth full day seminars by leading SQL Server professionals such as Chris Testa-O’Neill and Chris Webb (see http://www.sqlbits.co... [More]

Error: 0xC001405C at SQL Log Status: A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables "User::RowCount" for read/write access. A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out. Have you ever considered variable locking when building your SSIS packages? I expect many people haven’t just because most of the time you never see an error like the one above. I’ll try and explain a few key concepts about variable locking and hopefully you never will see that error. First of all, what is all this variable locking all about? Put simply SSIS variables have to be l... [More]

This is just a quick one prompted by a question on the SSIS Forum, how to programmatically add a precedence constraint (aka workflow) between two tasks. To keep the code simple I’ve actually used two Sequence containers which are often used as anchor points for a constraint. Very often this is when you have task that you wish to conditionally execute based on an expression. If it the first or only task in the package you need somewhere to anchor the constraint too, so you can then set the expression on it and control the flow of execution. Anyway, back to my code sample, here’s a quick scre... [More]

Published today on CodePlex is the SSIS Expression Editor & Tester project. If you want to try it just pop over to CodePlex and download it. About five years ago I developed my own expression editor control. It first got used in our custom tasks as the MS editor didn’t become available until SQL 2005 SP1, but even then it had some handy features I preferred. For example resizable panes so that if your expression result was more than two lines you could see them all. It also meant I could change the functions available in the tree view, the most obvious use being to add some handy snippets... [More]

Strangely enough for a predominantly SSIS blog, this post is all about how to perform data profiling without using SSIS. Whilst the Data Profiling Task is a worthy addition, there are a couple of limitations I’ve encountered of late. The first is that it requires SQL Server 2008, and not everyone is there yet. The second is that it can only target SQL Server 2000 and above. What about older systems, which are the ones that we probably need to investigate the most, or other vendor databases such as Oracle? With these limitations in mind I did some searching to find a quick and easy alter... [More]

The ExecutionValue execution value property and it’s friend ExecValueVariable are a much undervalued feature of SSIS, and many people I talk to are not even aware of their existence, so I thought I’d try and raise their profile a bit. The ExecutionValue property is defined on the base object Task, so all tasks have it available, but it is up to the task developer to do something useful with it. The basic idea behind it is that it allows the task to return something useful and interesting about what it has performed, in addition to the standard success or failure result. The best example perh... [More]

Here are the slides from my session (Design patterns for SSIS Performance) presented at SQLBits VI in London last Friday. Slides - Design Patterns for SSIS Performance - Darren Green.zip (86KB) It was an interesting session, with some very kind feedback, especially considering I woke up on Friday without a voice. The remnants of a near fatal case of man flu rather than any over indulgence the night before I assure you. With much coughing, I did turn the off the radio mic during the worst, and an interesting vocal range, we got through it and it seemed to be well received. Thanks to ... [More]

Unfortunately quite a few people have noticed our recent hosting problems, but if you are reading this they should all be over, so please accept our apologies. Our former web host decided migrate to a new platform, it had all sorts or great features, but on reflection hosting wasn’t one of them. We knew it was coming, and had even been proactive and requested several dates on their migration control panel so I could be around to check it afterwards. The dates came and went without anything happening, so we sat back and carried on on for a couple of months thinking they’d get back to us when t... [More]