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Why SSIS 2012? Authors: Babu A Aditya Kumar Technical Reviewers: Shridhar Revankar Srivatsav Meda

Abstract:

New version of Microsoft SQL Server has enhancements which

give greater flexibility and increased productivity to ETL devel-

opers and administrators. This white paper has details on steps

involved in upgrading existing SSIS packages, some of the chal-

lenges involved and benefits of using new version of SSIS.

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The new version of SQL Server has lot of exciting new features which will make developers and ad-ministrators who work on data loading and transformation work a lot easier. This white paper has detailed the benefits of using newer version of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS 2012) and vari-ous options available for migrating existing SSIS packages to newer version.

Why upgrade now?

SQL Server 2012 Integration Services has introduced a number of features and im-

provements to make developers and administrators jobs easier as well as more pro-

ductive. The table below outlines some of these enhancements and how will it help.

Development

Administrators

Enhancements Benefits

Scripting engine upgrade to VSTA 3.0 This upgrade provides Visual Studio 2010 shell for writing code and also .Net 4.0 framework support.

Trouble shooting and logging Setting logging at server level, capturing row count, data flow timing.

Comparing and Merging Changes made to the SSIS packages make it easier to compare and merge packages.

Shared Connection Managers Connection managers are created at projects level and can be shared across all packages inside project.

Parameters Using package level parameters package execution environment can be changed easily.

Enhancements Benefits

New reports for package trouble shooting. These reports provide package execution details which can be used to identify cause of issues.

CDC Components Integration of Change Data Capture (CDC) will help greatly in Data warehousing scenarios where incre-mental data loading is required. SSIS has OOB compo-nents for integrating CDC features.

Data Quality Services transformation Integration of DQS with SSIS makes it easier to inte-grate data correction, enrichment and standardization with ETL load.

Project deployment model New deployment model introduced in SQL Server 2012. “Project Deployment” model enables deploying complete SSIS project as one unit.

Environments The project deployment model provides the ability to define parameters for packages and projects and modify the parameter values at runtime using the environments window.

Integration Services Catalog No more hassels of file deployments or msdb deploy-ment. A new feature that centralizes storage, admin-istration and configuration.

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There are some factors that need to be considered in upgrading from SSIS Packages to SSIS

2012:

SSIS Package Upgrade Wizard does not upgrade settings such as connection strings that

are defined in the package configurations like XML Configuration. After a package up-

grade, you may need to make some manual changes to the package configuration to run

the upgraded package successfully.

Refer the MSDN Documentation about “Integration Services Backward Compatibility”. This

section describes features that are no longer available or are scheduled to be removed in

a future release. It also describes changes to the product that are known to break, or to

change the behavior of, an existing application that includes Integration Services function-

ality. If you have used any of the features which are removed at new release then you can

take appropriate action to avoid migration failure.

There is no direct upgrade for packages which are prior to SQL 2005, you need to up-

grade to 2005/2008/2008 R2 and after that upgrade to SQL 2012.

While changing SSIS package deployment to “Project Deployment” mode, need to consid-

er following points:

If an SSIS package contains an Execute Package Task, the Project deployment

Conversion Wizard prompts you to update the task to use the project reference.

In project deployment mode, child package can be referenced from master

(parent) package by name as shown below:

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Key considerations in upgrading SSIS to SSIS 2012

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Convert Package configurations to Parameters when possible. Project Deployment

wizard provides option to convert configurations to parameters. If package has con-

figuration and parameters for same property then parameter values will override pack-

age configuration variables.

It is recommended that you configure the Execute Package Task to use parameter binding

to pass data from the parent package to the child package.

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The package upgrade can be done in different ways, couple of options available are:

1. Opening the earlier version of SSIS Project/Solution file in Visual Studio IDE 2010 – this

option is convert the whole project to 2012 version. It gives quick access to new version.

2. Using Utility SSISUpgrade.exe – this option supports to upgrade an individual package to

latest version. Also it accepts the parameter like about output info like whether we need

to keep the older file or want to replace with new version.

Following section details on upgrading package using SSISUpgrade utility.

Microsoft has provided a utility Named as “SSISUpgrade.exe”. You will find this utility at “%

ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\110\DTS\Binn” folder, after installing SQL Server 2012

RC0.

Use the SSISUpgrade utility to migrate packages that were developed in SQL Server 2005 Inte-

gration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server 2008/R2 Integration Services (SSIS) to the package for-

mat that the current release of Integration Services uses.

Follow the given steps to migrate the packages to newer version.

SSIS Upgrade Wizard Steps

1. The wizard can be launched manually by running SSISUpgrade.exe, which is located under

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\110\DTS\Binn.

What are SQL

Azure fea-

tures?

Upgrade options

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2. If you are running the utility with Administrator privilege then you can open it directly, if

you are any other user then execute the utility using “Run as administrator” mode for suc-

cessful conversion and avoid surprise issues due to limitations in access rights.

3. After launching the application, you will find the following Welcome screen as exhibit be-

low.

4. Follow the wizard and provide the appropriate inputs like sources packages which you need to

migrate, destination location in which you want to store the migrated packages., etc..

5. In one of the steps, you need to specify the package management options. Refer the link

“Package Management Options” to know about each option for the effective utilization.

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Option “Update connection string to use new provider name” will upgrade the provid-

er from “SQLNCLI10.1” to “SQLNCLI11”, refer the below warning message in the

screenshot which I faced during package migration.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 provides lot of significant features for Integration Services

(SSIS) in both the development and administration purpose. This white paper will help

SSIS developers for successful migration of their older solution to SQL Server 2012 so

that, developers can consume and take advantage of SQL Server 2012’s new features.

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