RE: SSIS' 15 Faults

SSIS: The backlash

SSIS Junkie — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:17:52 GMT

A colleague recently pointed out this thread to me from Oren Eini's blog . The post is entitled SSIS'

re: RE: SSIS' 15 Faults

richtebb — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:10:12 GMT

I had a similar reaction as yourself to Ayende's post - he shoots himself in the foot by showing off his lack of knowledge. But I can't let your point 7 pass without comment. You shouldn't dismiss this with an 'asinine' comment without thinking through the issues.

Version control is very difficult for dtsx files. It's not simply a matter of checking in and out - version control includes things like diff and merge, for all but the most basic usage patterns. See http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1645121&SiteID=1 for other complainers.

I challenge you to have a colleague make a couple of changes to a package, then see how long it takes you to work out what she did. And if she makes a change to the layout of the components, then you may even see the relevance of point 6 as well :)

re: RE: SSIS' 15 Faults

reedme — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:41:29 GMT

Fair enough, richtebb. However, if history is any product with a visual designer will suffer from the same fate. BizTalk does. Word does. Virtually every HTML editor that I've ever used does. I truly wish that it were easier to diff packages and that magic integers weren't used as undocumented keys throughout an allegedly open format (programmatic package generation is a nightmare), but I digress...

I thought I was clear that I have major objections to parts of the SSIS package schema. If you have to cheat with CDATA tags, then you might as well use a binary format because that ain't XML. I think we're in agreement there.

I wish that developers of allegedly WYSIWYG designers would be forced (in advance) to commit to an XSD schema and an object model contract instead of allowing their junk to organically grow as more stuff gets crammed into the UI... There would be fewer surprises if the object model were made clean first and the XML schema defined clearly (and human readably!) in advance. If the object model used for persistence to XML were actually used by the UI (instead of hiding persistence code in the UI!), it would be much cleaner. Doing contract-first development certainly wouldn't hurt the interaction design of the UI and would make it less likely that little things would fall through the cracks.

Just my $0.02USD (in 1901 dollars).