First published on MSDN on Jul 03, 2010
We’ve been hard at work on the next version of the product for a while now. I should be able to talk more about our plans sometime in the fall, but until then I can say that configuration and deployment has been one of our focus areas. I’ve recently been reviewing some old SSIS presentations (if you consider 2008 old), and came across a couple of great Tech Ed 2008 presentations from former MVP, now MS Employee Matthew Roche.
Enjoy!
Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services Deployment Best Practices
So you've built a set of SSIS packages to populate your data warehouse, and everything works great on your development environment, but what next? SSIS has a great set of tools, but when it comes to preparing for and executing a seamless deployment from development into test and finally into production, it's not always obvious what tools to use or how to best use them. In this session, learn how to prepare for and execute a seamless deployment of complex ETL solutions through a repeatable, testable process for both SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. If you're tired of saying "but it worked on my machine!" then this is one session you can't afford to miss.
Moving Beyond Package Configurations: An End-to-End Approach for Custom Package Portability
SQL Server Integration Services includes Package Configurations, a powerful mechanism for implementing location independence in SSIS packages, and an integral part of successful SSIS deployments. But package configurations are not adequate to every SSIS deployment scenario, and unfortunately there is no mechanism to extend or customize their behavior - it's all or nothing. This means that if package configurations don't give you what you need, you need to build your own replacement from scratch. This session presents a complete end-to-end replacement for package configurations, implemented using the SSIS .NET API. This solution includes not only the core code to implement the configuration functionality but also a set of development and management utilities to ease deployment, testing, and validation tasks that "just work" with package configurations but which must be replaced when using a custom solution. We look at the design criteria that necessitated a move away from the built-in package configurations feature, the code used to implement the solution, focusing on the challenges presented by the SSIS API, and a real-world SSIS solution in which the code and tools presented have been used for large scale production deployments.
