While attacking this problem, the first thing that I did was look into the SSIS package and see what I had gotten myself into.  There were hundreds of objects within SSIS, most of them T-SQL Scripts of Data Pump Tasks.  So simply going through them one by one wasn’t going to be all that helpful.  The client didn’t have any logging to SQL Server or to a text file setup, but they did have the SSIS package setup to log to the Windows event log.

Opening the Application log greated me with one event for the start of each task, and one for the completion of each task.  Not exactly the most useful information ever, but better than nothing, so I’ll take what I can get.  The first thing that I did was export the Application Event log to a CSV file and download it to my desktop so that I could do the processing on my local machine.  The CSV file has a few hundred thousand lines, so I needed to figure out what I had via scripting.  The first problem that I had was that for each SSIS event there were multiple lines within the csv when opened in Excel which you can see below.

Thankfully this made the rows pretty unique looking, so an Excel Macro was able to clean this up pretty easily.  Before I got started I added some column headers into the excel sheet.  The default columns from Event Viewer are Date, Time, Source, Severity, Category, EventID, User, Computer, Description.  This covered columns A through I.  After that I put columns J through P as being Operator, SourceName, SourceID, Execution, StartTime, EndTime and DataCode as these are the specific items that SSIS is logging that you can see above.  Then it was time to bust out a little VBA and flatten out all this data.  The macro shown below looped through the data and flattened everything out so that all the data was on a single line.  Then is went through and removed all the white lines.  This macro took about 3 hours to run.

Sub CleanUpData()
Dim Row As Long
Dim DataRow As Long
Row = 32768
Do While Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
If Range("B" & Row).Value = "" Then
DataRow = Row
Range("A" & Row).Select
Else
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 4) = " Mes" Then
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 4) = " Ope" Then
Range("J" & DataRow).Value = Range("A" & Row).Value
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 9) = " Source N" Then
Range("K" & DataRow).Value = Range("A" & Row).Value
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 10) = " Source ID" Then
Range("L" & DataRow).Value = Range("A" & Row).Value
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 4) = " Exe" Then
Range("M" & DataRow).Value = Range("A" & Row).Value
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 4) = " Sta" Then
Range("N" & DataRow).Value = Range("A" & Row).Value
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 4) = " End" Then
Range("O" & DataRow).Value = Range("A" & Row).Value
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
If Left(Range("A" & Row).Value, 4) = " Dat" Then
Range("P" & DataRow).Value = Range("A" & Row).Value
Range("A" & Row).Value = ""
End If
End If
Row = Row + 1
Loop

Do While Row 2
If Range(“A” & Row).Value = “” Then
Range(Row & “:” & Row).Select
Selection.Delete
End If
Row = Row – 1
Loop
End Sub

Once that was done I needed to set the start times for each event on the same line as the end time for each event. That way I wasn’t scrolling through looking for stuff while trying to do my data analysis. This I was also able to do with a little Macro. In this case I started on row 14 as that was the first entry that had SSIS data. You may need to change the EndRow=14 line to what ever line your data starts on. This puts the start time and the end time into Columns R and S, but only on the line which is the OnPostExecute line.

Sub FindRunTimes()
Dim EndRow As Long
Dim StartRow As Long
Dim SourceName As String
EndRow = 14
Do While Range("A" & EndRow).Value = ""
If Range("I" & EndRow).Value = " Event Name: OnPostExecute" Then
StartRow = EndRow + 1
Do Until Range("K" & EndRow).Value = Range("K" & StartRow).Value And Range("I" & StartRow).Value = " Event Name: OnPreExecute"
If Range("I" & StartRow).Value = "" Then
MsgBox "Ran out of rows to process for ending row " & EndRow
Exit Sub
End If
StartRow = StartRow + 1
Loop
Range("S" & EndRow).Value = Range("B" & EndRow).Value
Range("R" & EndRow).Value = Range("B" & StartRow).Value
'Range("T" & EndRow).Value = DateDiff("mi", Range("A" & StartRow).Value & " " & Range("B" & StartRow).Value, Range("A" & EndRow).Value & " " & Range("B" & EndRow).Value)
Range("R" & EndRow).Select
End If
EndRow = EndRow + 1
Loop
End Sub

Once that Macro was finished I needed to figure out which of the statements was taking to long to run. Putting a formula into the column Q marked the rows that I needed to look into a little more. In this case I was using anything with a run time of 20 minutes or longer as needing to be looked at.

=IF(HOUR(R595)=HOUR(S595)*60+MINUTE(S595),"", "X"), IF(HOUR(R595)*60+MINUTE(R595)+19>=HOUR(S595)*60+MINUTE(S595)+1440,"", "X"))

Once that formula was in there all the rows that were SSIS objects that took a long time to run had an X next to them. Now I still needed to ignore the rows which were containers, but those were pretty easy to figure out from the names of the objects as most of them had container in them (in the SourceName column which was column K of my Worksheet). At this point I was able to move back to the SSIS package and start digging through the package finding the objects which had long runtimes and getting those looked at.

The whole reason I went through this process instead of just adding logging to the SSIS package was for a few different reasons.

• I didn’t want to make ANY changes to production if I didn’t have to. This SSIS package loads a production data warehouse which the business uses to run their company, so making changes to it wasn’t something I wanted to try.
• If I had simply put logging into place I would have had to have waited another day to being looking at the problems as the ETL process only runs once a day.
• The SSIS package takes 8+ hours to run, so sitting around waiting for it to run wasn’t exactly the best use of my time, or the clients money.

If you get stuck in this same sort of problem, hopefully this approach will help you out.
Denny

Denny

It doesn’t appear that you actually need to have the service running.  I have stopped the SSIS service on my workstation and I am still able to run my SQL 2008 SSIS packages, however I would recommend setting it to manual rather then disabled just in case BIDS needs it running for some reason.

If you try and edit an existing package without the SSIS service installed an error message will be displayed saying that the service needs to be installed.

Denny

 Open BIDS, and select Tools > Options.  On the menu on the left select “Business Intelligence Designers” then “Integration Services Designers”.  In the Script box in the middle of the right pain change the option in the drop down from “Microsoft Visual C# 2008″ to “Microsoft Visual Basic 2008″.

If you prefer C# you’ve got nothing to worry about as C# is the default option.

Denny

 The official fix from Microsoft is to install the older CTP version that you edited the scripts in on another machine and open the un-updated version of the SSIS package on that machine, and copy the code for the scripts into the RC0 version of the SSIS package.

The only object which I’ve had to do this on was a .NET Script Task.  I had this problem when going from CTP 5 to CTP 6 as well as from CTP 5 to RC0.  This will not effect migrating from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 as SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 CTP 5 do not use the same scripting engine in the back end.

Denny

Some background on what the process is that I’m working on.  Basically I’ve got a table with catagorized data in it.  I need to export all the data from the table info one file per catagory (don’t ask, I didn’t design it, I’ve just got to automate it; and it actually makes sence in the grant schem of things).  Well I figured that the easiest way to do this was to use a foreach loop and give it an XML document with the list of catagories to process.  (This was better than looping through and getting the next value from the database.)

 So needless to say, I get started on my little process.

The query which I’m using within an Execute SQL Task is below.  The Execute SQL Task puts the XML data into an SSIS variable called v_CategoryList with a data type of string.

SELECT WebsiteBlockCategoryId as id
FROM dbo.WebsiteBlockCategory cat with (nolock)
where WebsiteBlockCategoryId  <> 0
for XML AUTO

The XML document looks like this. (SSIS seams to be wrapping it within <ROOT></ROOT> tags for me which is why I’m not doing it my self.)  My XML document is actually must longer than this, but you get the idea.  It’s a very basic XML document.

<ROOT>
 <cat id=”18″ />
 <cat id=”19″ />
 <cat id=”20″ />
 <cat id=”21″ />
 <cat id=”22″ />
 <cat id=”23″ />
 <cat id=”24″ />
 <cat id=”25″ />
 <cat id=”26″ />
 <cat id=”27″ />
 <cat id=”28″ />
</ROOT>

As you can see on the screenshot of the forloop properties I’ve set the source to be my variable and the EnumerationType to Element Collection.  Since I know where the data is within the XML document I use DirectInput for both the outer and Inner XPath strings.  For the Outer XPath string I’m using “//cat”.  Because I’m not putting in the ROOT level name it doesn’t matter what gets put in there as long as there is a parent level.    For the Inner XPath string I’ve got the Element name with an @ sign in front of it “@id”. 

Over on the Variables page of the UI I’ve got my v_CategoryId variable mapped to Index 0 of my document.  If you need to output more than one element from your XML document set your Inner XPath to “*”.  This “should” allow you to bring back all the elements and refer to them by index number starting with 0.  I havn’t actually tried this, as I’ve always only needed a single element hense the “should”.

And to think, that little thing took me a couple of days to get working right.  I can only imagine trying to do this in SQL 2000 and DTS.

Denny