Steven Wright Blog

I have managed to set-up a SQL Server 2005 Express instance, on a windows-XP machine, with remote connections enable. The actual installation of the SQL Server 2005 express instance was straightforward, but enabling the remote connections was problematic. I found that I was not the only person. In the end I found these steps worked for me: Open up the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration Manager Click on Surface Area configurations for services and connections. Click the remote Connections entry on the tree, select local and remote connections (TCP/IP) . Click OK. Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager Select SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration/Protocols for the instance. Right click TCP/IP, select properties. Click the IP Addresses tab, change the Enable flag on the IP addresses to YES. In the IPAll section, copy the port value of the TCP Dynamic Ports to the TCP Port. Clear the TCP Dynamic Port value. Click Okay. Open up Control Panel/Firewall. Click Exception...

Do you need to write a custom component to transform input data, and disregard this input data, instead, replacing it? That's was what I needed to accomplish with my component. It takes data from the input buffer and performs a lookup via an external API. If there is a match, send the result data down a "match" output otherwise send the input data down a "unmatch" output. The key here is that the "shape" of the output was changing. In other words, the metadata of the output was very different from that of the input.I also want my component to be synchronous (meaning synchronous, I mean that the component takes a row, processes it and then immediately sends it down an output) and not asynchronous (meaning that it reads all the data and then processes the data in an internal buffer). Now from what I was reading and seeing this was what I thought SSIS meant by synchronous and asynchronous components, but I was wrong! An asynchronous component can either...

I am currently working on a project which needs to load over a 1000 xml files. The files are stored across 10 subfolders. I am using a foreach loop with a file enumerator, which is configured at the top of the folder structure and traverses the subfolders. This loops through the files, load the data and then moves the file to another folder. The package executes fine for a few 100 files but then hangs; this happens after a different number of processed files each time the package is run. While trying to resolve the problem we ran performance counters and noticed that the number open handles increased significantly just about the time Dtexec looked like it had hanged and DTexec also then started taking a lot of the cpu processing time. Update: I put this on the Microsoft forums and got a intresting answer back See Here ; There seems to be a memory leak with foreach loop which should be fixed in sp1.

I have been writing a custom source adapter that uses a file connection within the connection manager. If I hard-code a specific file then the component works. However if I use a file connection that has an expression defined which updates the connection, for example when you have a for-each loop looping over a set files. The file connection doesn’t seem to re-evaluate expression each time you access the file connection via the code.

I have noticed a problem with the script task within SSIS. The problem occurs when a script task encounters an error and the SSIS on-error event also has a script task that uses a variable that is being locked by the script task that raised the error. The problem seems to be that the SSIS on-error event fires and runs before the script task that raised the error has finished and released its lock on the variable. I have even tred to overcome this problem by using a try/catch block to release the variable locks but this also failed to resolve the problem.

I have a SSIS package with a simple data flow task, which takes data from a flat file and loads it to an OLE-DB destination (which is configured to use Native OLE-DB\Native Client). As I ran the package via the command-line I noticed that SSIS made changes to the database options. One of the most important options that were being changed was the database recovery model which was modified to run under Bulk-Logged. This changing of the recovery model could cause problems for the back-up and recovery procedure if you are using incremental transaction log back-up as Bulk-Logged will not allow this to run. I can understand why SSIS makes this change because Bulk-Logged does not write any data to the transaction log for Bulk operations. For this reason it does not allow incremental log back-ups and always recommends that you do a back-up of the database when you change back to Simple or Full mode.

I have been working with SSIS using the XML Task and XML Source Adapter. I was getting an error say that an element is was not defined. When I check the XSD, which was using import / include schemas, I found the element was difined but not in the main XSD schema the adapter was pointing to but another schema which was being imported. The probelm was with the schema were the element was defined not being invaild for the XML Source Adapter, that was the real probelm, as soon as I corrected the imported schema the error was resolved. The probelm with the imported XSD schema there was some DTD define at the being of the file and XML Source Adapter does not support a mixture of DTD and XSD.

While I was using the SSIS Execute SQL Task to return a single row result I getting the following error: [Execute SQL Task] Error: An error occurred while assigning a value to variable "RestoreCmd": "The type of the value being assigned to variable "User::RestoreCmd" differs from the current variable type. Variables may not change type during execution. Variable types are strict, except for variables of type Object!." This was happening becuase I was trying to assgin a varchar(max) result column to SSIS string variable. There are two ways to solve this problem; one is to change the SSIS variable to object and convert each time it used to a string; the second way to solve this is to cast result column to max size limit.

I have been looking into the feasibility of using database snapshots as method of rolling back an SSIS package that fails and this is what I found: Creating a database snapshot was not a real problem, there is one issue that you need to be aware of. For each data file within the database that the snapshot is being based on there will have to be a sparse file created for it. I have created a little SQL script that automates the creation of the database snapshot. Rolling back a database to its initial state after a package has errorred is a problem. The method to revert a database back to its initial state with database snapshots is a restore operation. The restore is a full restore, which of course means there can't be any connections while the restore is happening and this can't be done on-line because it might have to take out the primary data file. This is a problem because SSIS connection manager will create connections to the database when the package starts and doesn...

I have written some code, which will create a report and deploys it to a report server. However the connection string for the report has to use SQL Authentication. My code which builds the reports uses the same approach that Microsoft does to SQL Authentication within report, which is to not store the UserID and Password, so what would happen now when the report is displayed in the report viewer is that a prompt would appear asking for a username and password. This behavior had to be suppressed, because I did not wish the users to know or need to type in a userid or a password, so I tried to resolved this by looking for a way to get the connection string stored on the server when deploying the report, like you can when you use SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio, with no joy. I did find a solution with the Report Viewer control, there is method to send the data source credentials to the server without the user having to type them in. Below is an example: 1: rvRepor...