SSIS Snack: Grid Data Viewer

Introduction

SSIS Data Viewers are handy – very handy. I use them so much the Data Viewer link on my Data Flow Path context menu is showing signs of wear. I click on it that much.

Using the Grid Data Viewer

I’m starting with the Data Flow I built for SSIS Snack: The Trash Destination Adapter. The green arrow between the “Dummy Source” (OLE DB Source) and Trash Destination adapter is a Data Flow Path. Right-click it, and then click Data Viewers to open the Data Flow Path Editor:

 Click on the Add button to add a new data viewer. There are several types, accept the default Grid Type for this exercise:

 You can configure which columns appear in the Grid Data Viewer by clicking the Grid tab and selecting columns to view. Once configured, click the OK button and the close the Data Flow Path Editor. When you execute the Data Flow Task, the Grid Data Viewer will “pause” the data flowing through the data flow pipeline and display it in the grid data viewer:

 If you click the Copy button without clicking any rows, the contents of the data viewer will transferred to the clipboard. If you click rows first, only the selected rows will be copied. You can then open Excel and paste the rows – column headers and all – for more analysis:

Conclusion

Data viewers are an awesome troubleshooting utility for SSIS!

:{> Andy