Database documentation - schema vs ETL packages

  • Hello,
    My supervisor has a wild hair about this and tasked me to see about options for an idea he had.  Basically, we want to be more on-the-ball about knowing which ETL packages will be affected by changes in schema in various databases.  In addition to packages, which are SSIS, any T-sql in SQL Server jobs would be tracked.

    His reason is pretty simple.  We pull data out of various vendor dbs--sometimes directly, sometimes via API if it exists--and migrate the data to other systems, including reporting marts.  The vendors will give us a list of schema changes, or we figure out what is changing via comparing on a test system...currently, we then have to think "I wonder which packages and jobs are going to break because of this!"

    We are small, and don't have any current software for documenting dbs now.  This is partly because most schemas are controlled by devs due to ORM systems--we don't have much business logic in triggers/procs etc.   That said, it might be worthwhile to fold this "ETL tracking project" into an overall db documentation effort.

    Going in, I think it's likely this will end up being a custom thing if we do it--probably some tables storing packages related to tables/dbs that we and others can query.   But I'm going to check out there to see if this is something we could do in any off-the-shelf software. 

    Long story short, any recommendations?

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