Knight's Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 45

Easing Deployment with Configuration Files

In the previous lesson, you used tables to configure package properties. In this lesson, you learn that you can also use files to store configuration information for your packages. The goal of safe deployment with minimal changes is the same, but in this lesson, you reach your goal using files instead of tables. The SSIS Package Configuration option enables you to store values for any SSIS property for a package, connection, container, variable, or task. You can store these values in tables, as discussed in the previous lesson, or in an XML file.

Functionally, the process works the same whether the configuration uses a table or XML files. The value in the configuration file is used instead of the design value used during development of the package.

One of the advantages of an XML configuration is that deployment becomes easier. Copying the production version XML files is simpler than adding rows to a configuration table. Versioning is better also, because this method is more compatible with most source control systems.

In practice, you create a version of the configuration file for each environment. Each version contains the property settings appropriate for one environment. Then each file is copied to the same directory name on each of the servers. Once you set this up one time, all future deployments will not require any changes to the packages or the configuration files. Future deployments will be less error prone because ...