What a week! Hot on the heels of MDDE appearing on Codeplex, another internal MS solution for generating SSIS packages dynamically appears . I saw a Vulcan demo a couple of months ago, and was really impressed. It generates SSIS packages from XML definition...

Anjan Das (SSIS Program Manager) has posted about the SSIS Package Submission Program in the forums. The goal of the program is to further test out our 2005 to 2008 upgrade process, and identify any issues prior to RTM. Here are all the details: THE MICROSOFT...

You can set a couple of package upgrade options in the designer through the SSIS options page (Tools -> Options...) These defaults will be used anytime you upgrade a 2005 package through the designer. See my post about the Upgrade Wizard for more details...

The SQL Server Metadata-Driven ETL Studio (MDDE) was an internal MSIT project first shown at the MS BI Conference last year. The initial release is now up on Codeplex . There isn't much information up about it yet, but I'm told that docs and examples...

Incase you're wondering about the increased blog activity - I'm currently working out of the new MS development office in Shanghai, China. I figured the 16 hours I spent traveling yesterday was a good time to catch up on some blogging. I'll be here for...

SSIS packages created in 2005 have to go through an upgrade process to run in 2008. 2008 packages created prior to the February CTP also have to be upgraded. The upgrade kicks in automatically once the package is loaded by the runtime - whether in the...

The February CTP has been out almost a month now, but just incase you hadn't checked it out yet, I thought I'd post a heads up. The February CTP introduced Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), replacing Visual Studio 2005 as our Business Intelligence Designer...

The SQL Native Client (SNAC) provider was renamed from SQLNCLI to SQLNCLI10 in 2008. The means that connection strings that used the Yukon provider (SNAC9) won't work if you only have the Katmai provider (SNAC10) installed. This will affect most SSIS...

The new Data Profiling Task in 2008 generates an XML output file. The output is easy to read, and could be used to make decisions within a control flow. For example, you could check whether or not to process your most recent data set based on criteria...

There's been some great feedback coming in about the new data profiling task. Jamie Thompson has a set of blog posts that cover all of the different profile options, and yesterday I read an interesting post from John Welch which describes a clever way...

Update: 2008-08-13 - The connector pack will be available two to three months from the GA of SQL 2008 Update: 2008-10-02 - The Oracle and Teradata connectors are now available Update : 2008-11-26 - The SAP BI connections are available Darvey...

Update: See this follow-up post on writing data to MySQL . I've recently seen a bunch of questions about connecting to MySQL from SSIS, so I thought I'd give it a try. Our connectivity wiki currently doesn't have anything about MySQL on it, but I'll...

Here's a quick tip from a couple other members of the SSIS team, Da Lin and David Noor. If you have a lookup component using partial cache mode using a Visual FoxPro oledb provider to connect to your reference table, be sure to change the OLE DB Services...