I have decided that, as great and powerful as it is, SSIS sucks (but only a little). There are way too many little things that make working with it frustrating:
- Why did they feel the need to invent a new type of drop down list, one that shows a modal form? When selecting input and output data sources, you are shown a drop down list of data source and clicking the arrow doesn't display what you normally get from this type of list, but a modal form shown the entries alongside tick boxes; the form also has a Cancel and OK button. It's confusing.
- Error messages are generally not that helpful
- Data conversion problems (which also relates to error messages). Consider the following message when creating a relationship between a derived column (and the data types aren't SQL ones - they are the OLEDB/SQLClient ones, making it more confusing) and a lookup column:
"The following columns cannot be mapped: [x, y]. One or more columns do not have supported data types or their data types do not match"
This is particularly useless; why doesn't it tell me what the data types are? They should be compatible as they are both strings, but obviously not. In fact one was unicode, one wasn't; simple to miss and I wish it could work things out a little more. - The languagesyntax disparity. I'm not sure this is a reall issue, but it seems weird to me. SSIS is a VS tool, so the language features (comparisons etc) use a C# style syntax, but I'm working with SQL so it seems as though I should be use SQL syntax.
I won't deny that SSIS is extremely powerful and very useful, but I think it needs spit and polish.
Listening to Throwing Fire at the Sun by Heather Nova from the album Oyster