SSIS (RSS)

RDN - Guest Starring Me for SSIS

Posted Tuesday, January 29, 2008 4:08 AM

Today was my first day presenting at RDN. It also marked my second and third user group presentations ever.

I can quite safely say that I am one of the least presented members of the Readify team, which is the main reason I took up the challenge of presenting at this level.

The Depth session was presented by Damian Edwards on CSS with ASP.NET using Visual Studio 2008. It was a really good session that gave me a great insight into CSS and hopefully will stop me from ever using tables again... :-)

My presentation was on SQL Server Integration Services, specifically in SQL Server 2008. The slide deck was not that intense and basically addressed the questions "What is SSIS?" and "What's different in SSIS 2005 and 2008?" It will be available soon on the RDN Downloads site.

In the meantime, I thought I'd put up a few links to the resources I used in preparing for this presentation.

As I mentioned tonight, I find the MSDN library help quite useless when it comes to developing SSIS packages. The SSIS Books Online site does have a couple of good intro and how-to topics.

For my demos, I used the November CTP of SQL 2008, which is available as a VHD from MSDN. This is a time-bombed installation of Windows Server 2003 with the SQL Server 2008 CTP pre-installed and set up with all the important features enabled, such as Reporting Services, Integration Services, etc.

For the "What's new..." I referred to MattM's blog. Specifically the excellent What's New in SQL Server 2008 Part One and Part Two summary posts. These link to a few other good write-ups as well.

Then there's CodePlex. The AdventureWorksDB and AdventureWorksBI sample database installations, along with the SQLServerSamplesIS SSIS samples are excellent resources.

For those new to SSIS and still living in the DTS world, all I can say is "what are you waiting for?!" :-)

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SSIS Loop Containers

Posted Monday, October 15, 2007 9:05 PM

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a short presentation on using loop containers in SSIS.

I promised a few people that I'd publish my code, so here it is.

For those that didn't make it, the package demonstrates a basic ForEach Loop container. I decided to demonstrate something that was absolute hell to accomplish in DTS.

Back in the SQL 2000 world, if you wanted to send an automated email to customers, the basic procedure was to write a nasty ActiveX script that would hit the database, loop through the results, create and send an email, then update the database.

In SSIS this is easily accomplished with a ForEach Loop. I show this in the sample from my demo that executes some SQL using an Execute SQL Task to produce a Result Set and looping through the rows with a ForEach loop container to send an email before updating the current row with another SQL Task. I created the package (almost) from scratch within 10 minutes in my demo on Saturday.

I've tacked in a change, which enables a package configuration to demonstrate how you would configure the package in a more practical environment. Please check out the Readme to get an idea of what you need to do to get the package working.

If you have any issues with the package, leave a comment or use my Contact Me form to send me an email.

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