SQL Server Integration Services - Loop Containers

As we briefly mentioned in the previous installment of this series, among features introduced in the SQL Server 2005 Integration Services there are For and ForEach loops, implemented in the form of containers that can be incorporated into the Control Flow part of a package design.

Reproduced with kind permission from the blog of Ashvini Sharma (MSFT)

InfoPath forms can be saved to XML, these XML Files can later be used in SSIS XMLSource adapter to pull out the data in tables and columns. However, there are some common problems you may meet in these scenarios. This article describes how to work around these potential problems. The issues mentioned in this article is not only specific to InfoPath files, it can also be referenced in other similar situations as well.

How to Asynchronously Execute a DTS package from ASP or ASP.NET

The Data Trasformation Services are a powerful tool, and sometime its features are so useful that you’d like to invoke a DTS package not only from SQL Server but from an external program.

To do this you have several choices: you can use the DTSRun.exe tool or you can do it leveraging the SQL-DMO features.

Unfortunately if you’re developing a web application (ASP, ASP.Net or whatever you use) none of them seems to be the right choice: too much problems, too much effort and a very modest results. In addition none of these solutions can be called asynchronously: if you just need to implement a “fire-and-forget” technique, you just cannot do that!

Easy Package Configuration

One of the age old problems in DTS is moving packages between your development, test and production environments. Typically a series of manual edits needs to be done to all the packages to make sure that all the connection objects are pointing to the correct physical servers. This is time consuming and gives rise to the possibility of human error, particularly if the solution incorporates many DTS packages. Many companies have provided their own custom solutions for managing this problem but these are still workarounds for a problem that is inherently DTS's.

For Loop Container Samples

One of the new tasks in SQL Server 2005 is the For Loop Container. In this article we will demonstrate a few simple examples of how this works. Firstly it is worth mentioning that the For Loop Container follows the same logic as most other loop mechanism you may have come across, in that it will continue to iterate whilst the loop test (EvalExpression) is true. There is a known issue with the EvalExpression description in the task UI being wrong at present. (SQL Server 2005 Beta 2).