Professional SQL Server® 2008 Integration Services

Chapter 9. Scripting in SSIS

With the introduction of C#, and the embedding of the new Visual Studio Tools for Applications into SSIS, you can't think of using the Script Task and Script Component as scripting anymore; now it's all-out programming. In the early days of DTS-based SQL Server ETL processing, the ActiveX Script Task allowed you to embed programmatic logic and became the Swiss-Army knife of package development. Typically, you'd code logic into these Script Tasks to control the execution and logic flow within a package or to perform some specialized business validation.

Scripting in SSIS has completely evolved from these simple ActiveX roots. You've still got a Swiss-Army knife hidden in here, but there is a separation of functionality from previous uses of ActiveX scripting into three new concepts: the Scripting Task, the Scripting Component, and Expressions. Expressions are completely new to SSIS and replace the old methodology of manipulating variables or properties within the package model. The other two Scripting Components provide access into a new scripting development environment using Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA). This change finally allows SSIS developers to script logic into packages using Visual Basic 2008 or Visual C# 2008 .NET code.

In this chapter, you learn all about these new scripting options and learn how to exploit them in your package development tasks to control execution flow, perform custom transformations, manage variables, ...