Migrating SSIS Projects and Parameters, Part 1 is Live at SQL Server Central!

Have you ever moved an SSIS project from one SSIS Catalog to another? With Catalog Environments and References? If you haven’t, you may be in for a surprise when you try.

First, why should you try?

“SSIS is software development.” – Andy, circa 2008

Best practices for software development apply to SSIS. One of those practices is: Never allow developers to deploy their own code to Production. Does this sound like a silly rule? If you’re the only developer in your enterprise, this is a silly rule. But even for you, O’ Lone Developer, software best practices can help prevent you from stepping on your own foot. (You are my hero, O’ Lone Developer…)

Why is this even a best practice? Let’s get hypothetical. I don’t like to be negative, so I will not ask, “What if you get hit by a truck?” I’ll be positive and ask, “What if you win the lottery?” We don’t really need to go to an extreme of death or lottery-winning: What happens when you (try to) take a vacation? (Andy’s Rule for Calling People Who Are on Vacation: If you get called while on vacation, you get paid for that day.) You want a repeatable process in place for software deployment – for code promotion. Even if no one but you ever promotes code, the process needs to exist and be documented. A video file on a file share will suffice. Heck, screenshots pasted into a Word document will do the trick. Something is better than nothing. You need your vacation time. All of it.

Migrating SSIS Projects and Parameters, Part 1 is live at SQL Server Central this morning. In this article, I discuss some of the “gotchas” surrounding SSIS code promotion in the enterprise and some solutions.

Kevin Hazzard (Blog | @KevinHazzard) and I built SSIS Catalog Compare to help. We’ve built other tools, too, but we’ll talk about those in other posts. Do you have 3 minutes? Go to the SSIS Catalog Compare page and check out the 3-Minute Drill video… especially if you’ve promoted an SSIS project from one Catalog to another. I would love your feedback.

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