Professional SQL Server® 2008 Integration Services

Chapter 22. Administering SSIS

So you have a set of packages and are ready to run the package in production. This chapter focuses on how to administer packages after you've deployed them to production. Specifically, we cover how to configure, deploy, and then administer the SSIS service. We also cover how to create a stand-alone ETL server and some of the command-line utilities you can use to make your job easier. After this chapter, you'll be able to create a package that will not require any effort to migrate from development to production after the first deployment.

Package Configuration

Now that you have a set of packages complete, the challenge is trying to migrate those packages to your testing environment or production without having to manually configure the packages for that environment. For example, your production server may not have the same directory to pull extract files from or the same user name to use to connect to the database. Configuration files help you make the migrations seamless and the configuration automated to reduce your risk of errors. In this section and the next, you'll see two different methods for configuration. One is to create a configuration repository and the other is to create your own repository, which mimics configuration files but gives you more flexibility.

The SSIS Package Configuration option allows you to write any SSIS property for the package, connection, container, variable, or any task into an XML file or a table, for example, and then ...