SSIS Components in Denali

[James Beresford]

I’ve finally had a chance to boot up SSIS in Denali and play with it myself. In this post i’m going to look at some of the*things that have -*and surprisingly – have not*appeared…*

The Components

I’ve had a scan through the Tasks in the Control Flow and Components*in the Data Flow to see what’s there. First observation is that all the components have got funky new icons.*I don’t see anything new function-wise*on the control flow, but it’s interesting to note the Execute DTS 2000 Package task remains, implying this piece of backwards compatibility will still remain.*

SSIS Data Correction Component


*

There’s only one completely new item available on the Data Flow, which is the Data Correction component. However as per this blog post by Hennie de Nooijer*on his BI Future blog, it appears to be unusable. It looks like this is where SSIS will touch upon the Data Quality Services component of SQL Server (SSDQS), but since it has no Advanced Editor available and it can’t be configured by the normal editor there’s not much*I can find out about how this component works. One for review in a future CTP.*

There’s a sort of new, sort of not, item in the form of the Source and Destination assistants, which are effectively Wizards for building Source and Destination *adapters. It tidies up the toolbox a bit but other than that doesn’t seem to add much for experienced users.*

Fix these problems!

However, there are things that desperately needed to change that haven’t. The Slowly Changing Dimension component has had no visible changes, leaving us with the poorly performing (usually to the point of unusability) RBAR toy we have already (a previous suggestion on Connect was killed in 07). The Pivot Transformation still has no usable interface (a previous suggestion on Connect was killed in 06) and remains confusing and difficult to configure. The Derived Column transform still locks you into Unicode strings if you have a text field, and overrides your setting if you change it, then alter the expression, and there also appears to be no new functionality in terms of added functions (my request to make this extensible on connect has been killed).*

There generally seems to have been a lack of updates that address some of the existing*issues with*individual components – given that some of these – especially the SCD and Pivot – have been poor since day 1 – now 5 years ago – it’s a shame to have seen no changes at all.*

To at least get the Pivot and SCD fixed I’m raising new connect items for them – please vote for them by following the links below and we may get them fixed*in a future*CTP:*

• Request for a decent UI for the Pivot
• Suggestions to improve the SCD component

Thanks in advance!



Get More from the original blog...