Please register if you plan on attending so that the hosts can arrange enough food as well as to ensure you get registered for SWAG!

http://omahamtg.com/Events.aspx?ID=142

Environment variables can be created by right-clicking on the environment in question and selecting “Properties.”

In the properties window, select “Variables” so that you can add new variables.

As long as you stay within the 4,000 character limit, you’ll be fine. If you exceed that limit, expect an error message as below:

Clicking on the error message in the highlighted progress window, you can see the full details:

Yep, internally, the SSIS team uses the sql_variant data type, which cannot store an NVARCHAR(MAX) column. Since our string is longer than 4,000 characters (the max limit for NVARCHAR), the data type of the data we are sending must be converted to an NVARCHAR(MAX) which is an incompatible type for sql_variant.

The SSIS team is aware of this and hopefully they’ll be putting in a limit to prevent users from entering anything more than 4,000 characters to prevent the error from happening in the first place, or at least raising awareness of the limitation.

Also of a somewhat unrelated note – if you choose to set a variable to “sensitive” once you save it to the database by clicking the OK button, you will not be able to retrieve its value from within the GUI. Just beware. Treat the sensitive property as if you were working with passwords (which may be a common use of this property anyhow).

I will be presenting on two topics: SSIS changes in Denali, and Using Event Notifications for Monitoring SQL Instances.

The first session, SSIS Changes in Denali, is pretty self-explanatory. Expect that I will go through each of the major changes in demo form, with some discussions around each.

The second session around Event Notifications, will be quite a bit more advanced and will talk about using the Event Notifications infrastructure in SQL Server combined with Service Broker to implement a very robust monitoring system. This infrastructure allows for capturing all kinds of audit information such as creating a table, dropping an index, rebuilding statistics, blocking, deadlocks, etc… There’s quite a bit of information that can be captured. I will show how to set this up and how to consume the information for monitoring purposes.

Don’t miss your chance at seeing me speak (!) and most importantly don’t miss your chance at learning SQL Server topics for free. See you there!

An event flyer can be found here: http://www.ssistalk.com/Flyer_updated.pdf Please distribute as you see fit!

We have the call for speakers open right now. If you would like to speak and would like to know more information, please contact me (using the Contact link at the top of the page) or submit your details online and let us know you’d like some more information.

For more details, visit http://www.sqlsaturday.com/91/eventhome.aspx.

Read the announcement here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2011/07/11/sql-server-code-name-denali-ctp3-is-here.aspx

The SQL Error Log does not help much at all. Here’s what’s in the SQL Error log:
2011-05-06 09:06:17.28 Logon Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 38.
2011-05-06 09:06:17.28 Logon Login failed for user ‘DOMAIN\ssrs.service’. Reason: Failed to open the explicitly specified database. [CLIENT: 192.168.0.147]

The Windows Application log is not much help either.
Login failed for user ‘DOMAIN\ssrs.service’. Reason: Failed to open the explicitly specified database. [CLIENT: 192.168.0.147]

In other words, useless for troubleshooting. The way to obtain the database name the client is trying to connect to is to use SQL Server Profiler.

To set up SQL Server Profiler, connect to the SQL instance where the error is occuring and then track the following events:
Errors and Warnings: User Error Message
Security Audit: Audit Login Failed

For these two events, make sure you capture at least the following columns: ApplicationName, HostName, LoginName, SPID (required), StartTime, TextData (where the message text will be), Severity, State, ClientProcessID, and Error.

Then run the trace. You’ll see the following data under the “User Error Message” event when the login failure occurs:
Cannot open database “DatabaseName” requested by the login. The login failed.
For the “Audit Login Failed” event you’ll see the following data:
Login failed for user ‘BLUENE\ssrs.service’. Reason: Failed to open the explicitly specified database. [CLIENT: 192.168.0.147]

Using this information (and the rest of the info in the other columns you selected), you should be able to go to the source and identify which process is trying to connect to the specified database and take appropriate action.

If you’re interested in the other states that error 18456 can generate, please visit fellow MVP Aaron Bertrand’s page on this topic for a very nice listing.

Attached is the SQL Profiler Trace Template for SQL 2008 instances if you want to import it instead of manually configuring SQL Profiler. To import the template, in SQL Server Profiler, go to File->Templates and select Import…

SQL_Login_Failures_Profiler_Template.tdf (860 bytes)

First, setup four package level variables:
FilePath – string
SSISFolderFilePath – string
SSISFolderName – string
SSISFolders – object

FilePath should be set to the location where you want to store the packages. Include the trailing slash, and ensure that the location exists.
SSISFolderFilePath should be set to evaluate an expression (EvaluateAsExpression = TRUE), and its expression should be:
@[User::FilePath] + @[User::SSISFolderName]

Then create a connection manager object that points to your MSDB database where you want to extract from. If you want this to be dynamic, perhaps to archive ALL SSIS packages in your company, then this could be made a dynamic connection manager object (by using expressions) and you iterate over each server. For now, we’re only going to use one server.

Once these are setup, the rest is point and click, pretty much. Add an Execute SQL Task to the control flow, and configure it so that it returns a full resultset. See below.

The query for the Execute SQL Task is:

SELECT foldername
  FROM dbo.sysssispackagefolders folders
 WHERE EXISTS (SELECT NULL
                 FROM dbo.sysssispackages pkg
                WHERE pkg.folderid = folders.folderid)

*Note – the above SQL only assumes a flat directory structure. If you have subdirectories in MSDB, you can use a recursive CTE to create a hierarchy resultset.

With the Execute SQL Task set up, you’ll have to shred the results using a Foreach Loop Container. Inside the Foreach Loop Container, we will want to use a File System Task to create directories for our packages if they do not already exist. The configuration for that is below:

Next, we have to create a data flow and attach it to the Foreach Loop Container. The full control flow should resemble the next screenshot.

In the data flow, we have three components – OLE DB Source, Derived Column, and the Export Column transformation. Connect the OLE DB source to your connection manager object, and use the following query against MSDB:

SELECT folder.foldername,
       pkg.name,
       pkg.packagedata
  FROM dbo.sysssispackages pkg
  JOIN dbo.sysssispackagefolders folder
    ON pkg.folderid = folder.folderid

Then, configure the Derived Column component so that it creates one new column, FullFilePath. The following is the expression to use:

(DT_WSTR,500)(@[User::FilePath] + foldername + "\\" + name + ".dtsx")

Then configure the Export Column transformation as the following screenshot illustrates:

The final data flow should look like the following:

The only thing left to do is execute the package. Navigate to the location defined by the FilePath package variable and you should see a directory structure resembling that in MSDB with all of the SSIS packages saved.

If you wish to download the full SSIS package, here you go: http://www.ssistalk.com/ExportSSISPackages.dtsx

Here’s what I’m referring to (note the blue dashed line on the left):

Well, now’s your chance – please vote for Jamie Thomson’s suggestion to add this feature to SSIS. While there, please be sure to leave feedback as to why you would like to see this included.

Vote here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/644668/ssis-snap-to

Some of the immediate changes to highlight in CTP1 are: SSMS is now based on Visual Studio, sequence generators, several new DMV/DMFs (including one to investigate the resultset of a query/sproc without actually executing it), centralized SSIS management, SSIS changes, and others.

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/nov10/11-09PASS10PR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

Stay tuned here for some highlights in Denali CTP1, especially around SSIS.