In a previous post I spoke about the advantages of having sorted flows in SSIS to greatly speed up data insertion using fastload. The need to have a sorted flow brings some severe problems to the SSIS programmer that he need to be aware of and that IMHO  Read more

Alberto Ferrari posted some test we made working on performance optimization loading data in very large dimension tables. When we discovered that an int identity primary key is not handled by SQL Server just as an ordered set of data in a bulk operation...  Read more

I have been so used to use int identity fields as primary key for any table and to believe it’s the fastest way to define a clustered primary key that I never thought this can cause serious performance problems to SSIS. Until I tested it and discovered  Read more

If you edit a legacy DTS package with SQL Server Management Studio, you may want to know how we can show the multi-phase data pump operations. I haven't found an option to do this with SQL Server Management Studio. However, when you need to do something,  Read more

Almost one month ago I made a post about a brand new Distinct component for SSIS made by Alberto Ferrari and freely available on SQLBI.EU . The most used way to get distinct rows in a Data Flow that I've seen is to use the Sort component, asking only  Read more

Alberto Ferrari has published on SQLBI.EU a Distinct component for SSIS . The big advantage is less memory used when you have few distinct values extracted from a large set of data. Component and source code are freeware. Now the challenge is: how to  Read more

Yesterday I had to fix a simple still subtle bug in TableDifference , I think sharing the experience will be useful for everybody involved in custom component creation. The component has some fields that are initialized in the component constructor, at  Read more

Several people downloaded TableDifference to handle SCD faster, some of them, especially using it on huge table (more than 10 millions rows) noticed memory problems. The problem is that of a flow running too fast and making TableDifference cache data,  Read more