Often when using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) you will find there is more than one way of accomplishing a task and that the most obvious method of doing so might not be the optimal one. In the video below I demonstrate this by way of an experiment using SSIS’s Flat File Source component; I show different ways that you can pull data from a flat file into the SSIS dataflow and also how the nature of the data itself can influence your choice as to how this task should be accomplished.

If you are having trouble viewing the video in your blog reader then head to http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2010/03/25/parsing-flat-files-using-ssis-ssis-nugget.aspx to see it as it is hosted on my blog! 

The main point I want to get across from this video is that a little bit of creative thinking when building your dataflows can sometimes be very beneficial for performance; quite often building a solution that isn’t the most obvious might actually turn out to be the best one.

You’ll notice, if you have watched the video, that my editing skills weren’t quite up to snuff and I cut off the final few words however all I was saying was that if you have any feedback on this video then I would love to hear it either via email or preferably the comments section below. I hope this turns out to be useful to some of you.

@Jamiet

P.S. Incidentally the parsing that we do using SSIS expressions in the video would be much easier if we had a TOKENISE function in SSIS’s expression language and I have asked for the introduction of such a function on Connect at [SSIS] TOKEN(string, tokeniser_string, occurence) function. Feel free to go and vote that up if you think this feature would be useful!