SSIS Review
All the necessary types of enumerators are available, but writing custom components and sharing them across multiple ETL streams is tricky.
Valuable Features:
- Compatibility with the rest of Microsoft BI stack
- Scripting component which opens unlimited possibilities: by having the full .Net stack/libraries available, if you need a yellow rubber duck to quack every million rows, it will quack
- Inter-stream dependency mechanism built directly into the tool; the whole ETL solution can be driven off it without having to employ third party software
- Parallel processing of a data flow: let's say there's five steps in the flow and ech step consumes output from the preceding step; once step #1 is completed and its data passed to step #2, the engine will feed the next batch of rows to step #1. Once the first batch of rows reaches the last step, there are five concurrent steps working on five different data sets, maximizing utilization of server resources
- All the necessary types of enumerators (files, xml nodes, rows and many more)
Improvements to My Organization:
- SSIS packages are stored in XML-like format; we keep them in SVN which makes it very easy to track changes
- Built-in dependency tool is really great; you can not only react to success/failure results, but you can evaluate any expression in the flow and execute (or bypass) any components based on the result of that expression. This gives you full control to build decision trees of any complexity
Room for Improvement:
- Writing custom components and sharing them across multiple ETL streams is tricky and requires specialistic voodoo knowledge
- Make the GUI less eye-candy and more responsive; especially the scripting component needs some TLC regarding UI responsiveness
Initial Setup:
It's easy to deploy, you just need a simple file-copy mechanism that is sufficient for most deployment scenarios.
Other Advice:
The good:
- Straightforward, intuitive, quick to learn
- Built-in debugger: variables, data viewers, breakpoints - everything you would expect from a modern software development tool
- Sleek, snappy UI
- Great flexibility with storing and deploying ETL components
The bad:
- Third party plug-ins may become incompatible with future versions of SSIS
- Upgrading is usually painful and time consuming despite what MS says
- Compatibility issues may arise when used with non-Microsoft technologies
**Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Last updated: Oct 04 2015

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