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Wednesday 14 March 2012

New features are available in SSIS Denali(2012) over 2008 R2


GUI IMPROVEMENTS
       Getting started window
       Package visualization
       Zoom
       Undo
       SSIS toolbox
       Data flow source/destination wizard
       Sort packages by name
       Grouping in data flow

CHANGE DATA CAPTURE
       Incremental load loads all rows that have changed since the last load
       How do we know what has changed?
o   Compare every source row with every destination row
o   Last modified date and a trigger to maintain this
o   Change tracking
o   Change data capture!
       SQL Server Enterprise edition, 2008 or higher
       Asynchronous process
       Captures all changes
       Maintains time window
       CDC data access via table valued functions Books online, change data capture

CDC TASK AND COMPONENTS
       CDC needs to keep track of which changes have already been processed
       CDC task does this by storing LSNs in a tracking table
       CDC Source component reads from the CDC table function, based on the LSN it got from the CDC task
       CDC transformation splits records into new rows, updated rows and deleted rows
       No documentation yet in RC0, check Matt Masson’s blog
       Based on Attunity CDC components

MAPPING DATA FLOW COLUMNS
       When modifying a data flow, column remapping is sometimes needed
       SSIS 2012 maps columns on name instead of id
       It also has an improved remapping dialog

ODBC SOURCE AND DESTINATION
       ODBC was not natively supported in 2008
       SSIS 2012 has ODBC Source & Destination
o   Handy for connecting to SQL Azure
o   Essential if SQL Server stops supporting OleDb
       SSIS 2008 could access ODBC via ADO.Net:
o   Has create table option, which ODBC lacks
o   No control on batch inserts nr of rows ODBC ADO.Net % Diff
o   Low performance


SCRIPTING
       Script task and script component now support .Net 4.0
       Breakpoints are supported in script component
       When developing custom components, there is better backpressure support:
o   SupportsBackPressure property, IsInputReady and GetDependantInputs method

EXPRESSION TASK
       The script task can be used to modify variable values… but it’s overkill• Expression task provides a simple task to change variable values

DATA QUALITY SERVICES (DQS)
       DQS is a new service to clean domain data
       Domain knowledge base needs to be build
o   Based on rules, positive and negative examples
o   Potentially using external data from Azure Marketplace or other providers

DQS CLEANSING TASK
       Cleaning and standardizing data before it is loaded in the data warehouse is essential
       DQS Cleansing task labels data in 4 categories:
o   Correct: a value accepted by the knowledge base
o   Corrected: a value on which DQS is confident it can correct to a valid domain value
o   Suggested: a value on which DQS is less confident, but can still suggest a domain value
o   New: DQS has no suggestions for this

PACKAGE CATALOG
       SSIS 2012 can work in the new project mode (default) or in old package mode (backwards compatibility)
       In project mode, many things change:
o   Project becomes the level of deployment
o   Deployment to SQL Server becomes obligatory
o   Packages not stored in msdb, but in dedicated user database:
·         The package catalog, named SSISDB
o   Logging happens automatically and is done in the package catalog
·         Custom logging still supported
       Projects can be converted from one deployment type to another
       Manage via SSMS: Relational engine• Fixed database name: SSISDB
       Stores projects, versions, logs, 5 reports, 25 views, 42 stored procedures, …
       This makes it possible to run, monitor and manage SSIS projects and packages via T-SQL!

PARAMETERS
       Just two scopes:
o   Package
o   Project!
       Read-only
o   Value is set when scope starts and cannot be changed
o   Can be set from SQL Server Data Tools configurations
       Often used together with environments
       Does not replace variables
o    a package configuration replacement
       Using the visual studio (SSDT) configurations we can configure default values for testing

SHARED CONNECTION MANAGERS
       Shared connection manager is defined at project level and is automatically available in every package
o   Not copied as in SSIS 2008
       Shared connection managers can be parameterized as well
       When converting shared connection managers back to regular (package) connection managers, they disappear in all other packages
       Shared cache connection managers are supported as well
o   This allows to cache data in memory in one package and reuse it in multiple other packages

ENVIRONMENTS
       Environments replace package configurations
       They can control parameter values and connection strings
       Environments are created in the package catalog
o   They are not deployed to the server, but created on the server
o   Don’t forget to reference the environment at the project level
o   Script them while creating, this eases creating multiple environments
       A server might have multiple environments
o   When we execute a package, we can choose which environment we’ll use

DATA TAPS
       Imagine a data viewer
o   Which can be added on the runtime server
o   Without modifying the package, but using T-SQL
o   Which writes the data to disk instead on visualizing it…
       Voila, you are now thinking about the data tap

More Enhancements

       .Net API and Powershell
       Pivot and row count transformation get a user interface
       Flat file supports
o   Embedded qualifiers
o   Variable number of columns (but still fixed meta-data)
       Raw file improvements
o   Generate empty raw file
o   Stores sort info
       DTSX files are becoming more readable and ‘mergeable’
       Merge and merge join improve backpressure handling
       4000 char expression length lifted
       New expression language keywords
o   LEFT as syntactic sugar for SUBSTRING(,1,)
o   TOKEN and TOKENCOUNT for shredding strings

2 comments:

  1. Very good post... neatly summarized all new and important features of SSIS denali

    ReplyDelete
  2. thanks you very much for sharing this.

    ReplyDelete