Tuesday, February 10, 2015

My first SSIS project: Part 1

 Helping myself and other beginners gain a better understanding of SSIS

I want to show my understanding and the methods I found from the Internet and colleagues to explain the concepts of SSIS. The reason I am doing this blog is because I want to leave a little bit of a guide for myself. If this blog sheds some light on the functionality of SSIS for you as the reader then that is great.
Some of the blog tutorials I have gone through are either are very vague and sometimes can’t be easily followed, other blogs have too much information and takes a lot of effort to maintain attention on the tutorial. I want my tutorials to be concise and easy to follow. Another reason for the creation of this blog is so that I won’t be constantly searching the internet for stuff I used before in my SSIS projects.



During this blog I will be using SSIS 2008. I will be splitting the project into smaller more comprehensive components to allow you to navigate to the parts that you do want. I will add the sources/references I used in my project at the end of this blog.

I will also put a full project at the end of this blog series.

Components of SSIS

The toolbox 






















Variables

My understanding of a variable is that it is a container for a specific data type. In SSIS, a variable will have a name so that it is easily identifiable (ideally). The scope of the variable will determine if the variable can only be seen in one item or multiple items from the toolbox or even the whole package.

The data type of your variable determines what can be allowed. If the data type is an int type then it can only accept whole numbers.

The value can be seen as what the variable is containing at this moment.

Properties 


I haven’t altered many of the options on the properties window. I mainly use it to change “Delay validation” and “Expression” property on items from the Toolbox.

Basic solutions for common things  you want to do in SSIS






Tips/ My general guidelines

·         Name your stuff properly from the beginning, it’s a pain trying to rename your variables because SSIS does not automatically change it for you. It then becomes a scavenger hunt once you start renaming variables.
·         Understand your data and what data types are needed

References









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