Thursday, May 31, 2012

Share cache across SSIS packages

Shared caching is a new feature of SSIS 2012 that could improve performance when using the same large lookup table across multiple packages.  It could be replicated by saving to a raw file in SSIS 2005/8, however this should be faster.


Prior to SSIS 2012 it was not possible to re-use or share the same cache across packages. What that meant is if you created a cache you will be able to consume it only in the very package where the cache was instantiated. Therefore, a developer could take only two routes from here – either make as much heavy ETL processing as possible inside the same package where the cache resides, or populate yet another cache object in every other package where it is needed. The latter was 
especially harmful leading to unnecessary heavy extra database calls and an extended development time. This limitation has been overcome in the SSIS 2012 release.

Monday, May 14, 2012

SQL Live Monitor

 

a .NET application that provides realtime performance data on the target SQL Server instance.
No installation required, data displayed in realtime, and can also be logged to CSV for offline analysis. Will also capture SQL data for processing uing PAL.

SQL Live Monitor

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Layerscape - Home Page

Layerscape is a fascinating Microsoft Research tool that integrates with Worldwide Telescope to provide deep spatial virtualizations.

 

Layerscape - Home Page

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Download: Microsoft® SSIS Balanced Data Distributor - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details

Useful for distributing workloads and speeding up SSIS performance.

Microsoft® SSIS Balanced Data Distributor (BDD) is a new SSIS transform. This transform takes a single input and distributes the incoming rows to one or more outputs uniformly via multithreading. The transform takes one pipeline buffer worth of rows at a time and moves it to the next output in a round robin fashion. It’s balanced and synchronous so if one of the downstream transforms or destinations is slower than the others, the rest of the pipeline will stall so this transform works best if all of the outputs have identical transforms and destinations. The intention of BDD is to improve performance via multi-threading. Several characteristics of the scenarios BDD applies to: 1) the destinations would be uniform, or at least be of the same type. 2) the input is faster than the output, for example, reading from flat file to OleDB.
NOTE:  An updated version of Microsoft SSIS Balanced Data Distributor (BDD) is available. This includes a fix for the problem causing BIDS to crash when removing the BDD transform. For more details, and download information, see
KB 2616527.

Download: Microsoft® SSIS Balanced Data Distributor - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details