My buddy Sutha Thiru sent me an email recently asking about my opinion on a particular nuance of the project deployment model in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) 2012 and I’d like to share my response as I think it warrants a wider discussion. Sutha asked:

Jamie

What is your take on this?
http://www.mattmasson.com/index.php/2012/07/can-i-deploy-a-single-ssis-package-from-my-project-to-the-ssis-catalog/

Overnight I was talking to Matt who confirmed that they got no plans to change the deployment model.
For example if we have following scenrio how do we do deploy?

Sprint 1
Pkg1, 2 & 3 has been developed and deployed to UAT. Once signed off its been deployed to Live.

Sprint 2
Pkg 4 & 5 been developed. During this time users raised a bug on Pkg2. We want to make the change to Pkg2 and deploy that to UAT and eventually to LIVE without releasing Pkg 4 &5.
How do we do it?

Matt pointed me to his blog entry which I have seen before . http://www.mattmasson.com/index.php/2012/02/thoughts-on-branching-strategies-for-ssis-projects/

Thanks
Sutha

My response:

Personally, even though I've experienced the exact problem you just outlined, I agree with the current approach. I steadfastly believe that there should not be a way for an unscrupulous developer to slide in a new version of a package under the covers. Deploying .ispac files brings a degree of rigour to your operational processes.

Yes, that means that we as SSIS developers are going to have to get better at using source control and branching properly but that is no bad thing in my opinion. Claiming to be proper "developers" is a bit of a cheap claim if we don't even do the fundamentals correctly.

I would be interested in the thoughts of others who have used the project deployment model. Do you agree with my point of view?

@Jamiet