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The Voice of the DBA

An SSIS Upgrade

I came across a post recently on the Microsoft Fabric blog about the evolution of SSIS 2025..I hadn't heard much about SSIS in SQL Server 2025, so I thought this might provide some info on the investments that Microsoft is still making in Integration Services. I've run into a few people in the past year who are still heavily invested in SSIS and run packages daily. SSIS seems to be a technology that isn't even close to dying for many organizations.

The blog starts well, delving into the security investments with the change to the SqlClient and TLS 1.3, as well as supporting Strict Encryption. I don't know many people using this level of security, but it's good to have SSIS support stronger security. There is also an upgrade for SSIS packages targeting Fabric Data Warehouses if they modify their approach.

There is also a mention of lift and shift into Fabric Data Factory as an early access program. I wonder how many organizations are looking to still run SSIS packages, but upgrade to Fabric. I'm sure there must be some, and I'm interested if any of you are in this situation. Many of us buy SQL Server licenses, so I would hope Microsoft could invest in a few new SSIS tasks, like SFTP at the least.

The rest of the post covers Fabric and Azure Data Factory, not SSIS. I understand that Microsoft would prefer everyone abandon SSIS and move to ADF/Fabric, but that's not what a lot of customers want to do. Many of us have no real need for complexity beyond what SSIS does. What I'd really like to see is a local version of ADF. Many of us still run our own systems and plan to do so for years. If there isn't going to be an investment in SSIS, which I do understand, then invest in a local version of ADF.

I doubt Microsoft has much interest in doing work here, especially as the trend towards lakehouses and Parquet files seems to drift further from the idea of SSIS moving data between systems. However, there is still a need for many organizations that might want to build packages to export their data to a data lake on-premises. They might prefer to host their own storage, use Polybase to query those files, and maybe grow into Fabric and Power BI over time.

Giving options is something Microsoft has often done in the past. Their successes often open the door wider for others to build on their platforms. Their failures are often in places where they try to force everyone to work in a particular way with a particular technology. Expecting everyone to move to ADF/Fabric feels like one of the latter decisions.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Featured Contents

Semantic Search in SQL Server 2025

Deepam Ghosh from SQLServerCentral

Learn how we can search text values in SQL Server 2025 using the new AI capabilities.

Common SQL Server Problems: Invalid Object Name

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Learn why SQL Server shows ‘Invalid object name’ errors and how to fix them.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - FinOps for Kubernetes: Leveraging OpenCost, KubeGreen, and Kubecost for Cost Efficiency

Adetokunbo Ige from Adetokunbo Ige

In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for running containerized workloads. While Kubernetes is one of the best orchestration tools, it also presents...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Streamlining Azure VM Moves Into Availability Zones

John Morehouse from John Morehouse | Sqlrus.com

One of the more frustrating aspects about creating an Azure virtual machine is that if you do not place it into an availability zone at deployment time, you’ve traditionally...

SQL Server Advanced Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning: Best Practices and Techniques

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This practical book provides a comprehensive overview of troubleshooting and performance tuning best practices for Microsoft SQL Server. Database engineers, including database developers and administrators, will learn how to identify performance issues, troubleshoot the system in a holistic fashion, and properly prioritize tuning efforts to attain the best system performance possible.

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Encoding URLs
I have this data in a table: CREATE TABLE Response ( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY , ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000) ) GO If I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use?
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Fixing the Error

On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.

I decide I want to run this code:

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';

I get this error:

Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.

What is the easiest way to fix this error?

Answer: Add an "N" before the first parameter in the UNISTR() function

Explanation: The easiest thing to do is change the UNISTR() parameter to an nchar one with an N. This will work as shown here: You can also add the collate clause, as shown here, but this is more cumbersome:

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night' COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_SC_UTF8, '*') AS 'A Classic';

Ref: UNISTR() - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/unistr-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver17

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