Hey Ron,

It's interesting that I came across your article when I did, as I'm currently cursing SSIS on a regular basis in my day to day worklife.

I've found in practice that the SSIS workflow tends to be a lot less fluid than what it seems in any of these small demonstrations. I'm currently involved in a huge data conversion project where we are making use of SSIS for the majority of the conversion efforts, and I'm about ready to jump out the window.

Even the simplest thing such as reading a flat file seems to fall apart in many real world scenarios. Take reading a large data file where the types cannot be easily determined by the first 10,000 rows, for instance - as that's the MAX that the flat file suggest types function will look at. So you're relegated to not making use of slick auto-magic features that are demonstrated, and rather stuck typing it all in by hand, assuming you know the max lengths and sizes you need for everything - if not you're stuck with trial and error, or using a third party program to do the analysis, and THEN typing it all in by hand.

How does anyone else get around these kind of setbacks that appear all to common with SSIS? Or am I the only one using SSIS who's not getting paid by the hour?!? Inquiring minds want to know...