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 t... [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]

Sometimes when working with SSIS you need to add or change settings in the .NET application configuration file, which can be a bit confusing when you are building a SSIS package not an application. First of all lets review a couple of examples where you may need to do this. You are using referencing an assembly in a Script Task that uses Enterprise Library (aka EntLib), so you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings, perhaps for the logging application block. You are using using Enterprise Library in a custom task or component, and again you need to add the relevant... [More]

In my previous post Searching for tasks with code you can see how to explore the control flow side of packages, drilling down through containers, task, and event handlers, but it didn’t cover the data flow. I recently saw a post on the MSDN forum asking how to edit an existing package programmatically, and the sticking point was how to find the the data flow and the components inside. This post builds on some of the previous code and shows how you can explore all objects inside a package. I took the sample Task Search application I’d written previously, and came up with a totally pointless l... [More]

I stumbled across a new SSIS tool on Codeplex today, the SSIS Log Analyzer which was only released a few days ago. Whilst it is a beta release and currently only supports 2005 (2008 is promised) it looks quite interesting. It seems to be a fancy log viewer, but with some clever features and a nice looking front-end. I’ve only read the documentation so far, but it has graphs and a debug view that shows your package with the colour animations similar to when debugging in BIDS, and everyone knows, the way the pretty colours and numbers change is the best bit! I’ll quote some of the features for ... [More]

This post shows you how to download files from a web site whilst really making the most of the SSIS objects that are available. There is no task to do this, so we have to use the Script Task and some simple VB.NET or C# (if you have SQL Server 2008) code. Very often I see suggestions about how to use the .NET class System.Net.WebClient and of course this works, you can code pretty much anything you like in .NET. Here I’d just like to raise the profile of an alternative. This approach uses the HTTP Connection Manager, one of the stock connection managers, so you can use configurations and prop... [More]