Focusing on SSIS

Since our migration to Sql Server 2005 a couple of months ago, Integration Services has always been a constant point of attention to our database development team. That's mainly because of the necessary and upcoming migration of the existing DTS packages, but also because of the constant trouble we experience with the technology.

Yep, we like it just as much as we hate it at times. Some random stuff from the past weeks...

* SSIS is in a lot of ways much stricter than DTS, certainly when it comes to data transfer tasks. Encoding of files didn't bother us in the past, but now we have to be very aware of how we handle and manipulate our imports. A data conversion task gave me some hastle when it discovered a special character in an import which caused an error concerning the truncation of data for that field. Although the content wasn't exceeding the length of the field, it appeared that the task couldn't correctly determine the length, so I had to ignore the so-called truncation in the error handling options.

* On our main production cluster we had to deploy a package. We store our packages in Sql Server (msdb) at this time, but we just did not succeed in the import on the server (with all the SP's and CU's installed). It produced the following error:

Element not found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8002802B
(TYPE_E_ELEMENTNOTFOUND)) (Microsoft.SqlServer.DTSRuntimeWrap)

In the end, we had to import the package using the client (SSMS) from another server.