Question

I have inherited a SSIS project.
I have never worked with SSIS before, and the one thing that seems strange to me, is that there is no way to manage multiple configurations.

For each SSIS package we have 3 delpoyment environments, DEV, UAT and PRODUCTION.

At the moment I am having to edit the configuration for every package we deploy manually for each change (and there are a lot of packages).

Does anyone know of a more graceful way to handle these configuration changes?

Answer 1

I’m not sure whether I’ve fully understood your set-up, but the way we handle this is to use configuration files which are shared between packages – i.e. the same config file is used by multiple packages – one for each database connection (we don’t have a need to share configurations for other object types). These files generally configure the database server name and the database name.

This means that each package will have multiple config files – one for each database connection, plus one configuring other options which are specific to the package.

(Note that you’re not limited to using files for config – you can also use registry keys, environment variables or a database table to store them)

It’s also possible to override package configuration settings at run-time by command-string arguments.

This article gives a decent introduction to SSIS configurations.