Christmas Came Late!

Santa has just delivered the gift that many SSIS developers have had on their Christmas lists: more samples and options for programmatically building SSIS packages. Although in this case, the role of Santa is played by Matt Masson of the SSIS team, who must have gained quite a bit of weight since the last time I saw him. Matt posted seven new articles on his blog yesterday, including this index post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mattm/archive/2008/12/30/samples-for-creating-ssis-packages-programmatically.aspx

There are samples for building a package with a data flow task, and for adding OLE DB Source and Destination components, adding the ADO.NET Source component, adding a Row Count transformation and adding a Conditional Split transformation. Each post includes nicely commented C# code, and each one goes a long way towards filling the documentation gap around the SSIS data flow API.

And if that's not exciting enough, Santa was just getting started. Evgeny Koblov, a tester on  the SSIS team has gone far beyond simply it easier to work with the less-than-intuitive COM API exposed by the SSIS data flow. He has built a better API. It's called EzAPI and you can read about it on Matt Masson's blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mattm/archive/2008/12/30/ezapi-alternative-package-creation-api.aspx. You can also download it and start using it on the CodePlex web site here: http://www.codeplex.com/SQLSrvIntegrationSrv/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=21238

EzAPI is probably the most exciting thing I've seen coming into the world of SSIS since the release of SQL Server 2008, if not before. It's essentially a native .NET wrapper around the underlying COM API, which doesn't sound particularly interesting at first glance, but since it delivers the ability to quickly and easily build SSIS packages and data flows through code, it's sure to be a time-saver (if not life-saver) for many SSIS developers.

Now please excuse me while I download EzAPI and start to play...