SSIS Talk

There is a bug where even if you have applied a patch or service pack to SSIS 2008, the version listed next to the “Integration Services” service in Management Studio continues to show 10.0.1600, which is the version number for RTM.

As always, if you are unsure, it is best to determine the actual version by looking at the files themselves, ie. dtexec.exe, or by confirming the version number in BIDS via Help->About.

While this isn’t a big deal, it is an annoyance. I’ve got the question out to the product team for their response, so stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.

EDIT - Please see Matt Masson’s (SSIS Product Team) comments below.

When using a Merge or Merge Join component in a data flow, your incoming data is required to be sorted. While it may be easy to drop a Sort component into your data flow, it may make more sense to perform the sort in your source query (if you are using a source such as an OLE DB Source component).

If you decide to use an ORDER BY in your source and want to tell the SSIS Data Flow that your data is sorted, follow the below steps:

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For those of you that wish to execute maintenance plans on a server and do not wish to have SSIS installed on said server, you will run into issues if you are on an RTM version of 2008 (version 10.0.1600).

The specific error message is “The SQL Server Execute Package Utility requires Integration Services to be installed by one of these editions of SQL Server 2008: Standard, Enterprise, Developer, or Evaluation. To install Integration Services, run SQL Server Setup and select Integration Services. The package execution failed. The step failed.”

This constraint has been lifted in Service Pack 1 and Cumulative Update 3, each. See: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961126/

Starting with SQL Server 2005 RTM and through the latest SQL Server 2008 build at the time of this writing, there is a pretty nasty bug with respect to the COUNT(expression) function and its rule that when using an expression, it filters out NULLs in its count results.
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Fellow MVP Aaron Bertrand has blogged about the MRU (Most Recently Used) server list in SSMS under SQL Server 2008 and how hard (and unsupported) it is to clean it up versus how it was under SQL Server 2005. Please give that a read and head over to Connect to vote for his suggestion as you see fit.

(it’s easy [but still undocumented] under SQL Server 2005 - just delete the mru.dat file…)

Connect item: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=424800

Just a quick tutorial on using a script component as a source… Follow the link for screenshots.

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