In a dataflow task, I can slip a rowcount into the processing flow and place the count into a variable. I can later use that variable to conditionally perform some other work if the rowcount was > 0. This works well for me, but I have no corresponding strategy for sql tasks expected to return a single row. In that event, I'm returning those values into variables. If the lookup produces no rows, the sql task fails when assigning values into those variables. I can branch on that component failing, but there's a side effect of that - if I'm running the job as a SQL server agent job step, the step returns DTSER_FAILURE, causing the step to fail. I can tell the sql agent to disregard the step failure, but then I won't know if I have a legitimate error in that step. This seems harder than it should be.

The only strategy I can think of is to run the same query with a count(*) aggregate and test if that returns a number > 0 and if so running the query again without the count. That's ugly because I have the same query in two places that I need to keep in sync.

Is there a better way?