SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It

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SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It

posted @ Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:49 PM

For a while last year, I thought I was the only one in the world using SQL Server 2005's new SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and I was feeling like there was very good reason for this. SSIS tries REALLY hard to make you hate it. The development experience in Visual Studio is god awful. Strange, vague error messages, counter-intuitive set-up, implementation, and configuration procedures, and about the worst possible experience you can imagine if you try to check your SSIS packages into source control and have more than one developer work on them.

The reason I felt so alone was the extremely limited documentation and lack of user posts I could find about *anything* SSIS related (granted, this began last year when they were very new). Well, I still really dislike SSIS, but I don't feel as alone. Even the great Ayende is feeling the pain a bit.

Being that SSIS and their config files are just XML documents, one would think sharing the packages via source control would be a fairly trivial matter. Well one of the dumbest/most frustrating things about SSIS is that the config files (.dtsConfig) contain NO formatting. Yep, one big XML string on ONE line. Well-formed XML, I admit, but unreadable/uneditable. And considering you need to edit these things regularly, prepare for pain.

Additionally, the fact that the entire file is on a single line makes version control (especially with my favorite, Subversion) a real nightmare, as they compare line by line when merging changes.

There is a lot of room for improvement in SSIS, especially the development environment and experience.

Comments

MLKMLK
Posted on: 9/19/2007 11:31 PM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
I totally agree. I have to type this up, so it can be Googled everywhere. SSIS sucks. Overall, I see that Microsoft wants to great things with this product with good intention. But the Microsoft QA department SUCKS BIG TIME. How can you let this piece of shit passed QA? I bet the MBA guys at Microsoft put a gun on you head to pass this piece of shit. All these little bugs(features) here and there just drive me crazy. I know very well about using any 1.0 product from Microsoft. But once you use SQL 2005, you don't have a choice, but to use this 1.0 Business Intelligence Studio for SSIS. @$R$()#*$!
BK
Posted on: 10/2/2007 9:41 AM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
I thought I was the only one that HATES this software. There are so many bugs, and the overall experience is so user-unfriendly.

Last night I had the joy of finding out the Transfer Database task does not copy primary keys, foreign keys, or indexes. Now I'm re-writing 8 packages to use the Transfer SQL Server Objects task instead.

Just another warning sign that Microsoft has jumped the shark. After this experience, the question isn't if I'm going to SQL 2008, it's if I'm going back to SQL 2000.
Grim Repear
Posted on: 4/1/2008 9:54 AM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
SSIS is the worst program I have ever seen in my life! How badly designed an interface can you GET? When it takes a day to make a program to import a simple flat file, there is something very wrong, and I have been doing these sort of tasks for 25 years!
Frustrated
Posted on: 6/3/2008 12:28 PM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
Oh Lord help me! ActiveX scripting is a pain to setup and unreliable too... WTF. why did they mess it up so much? I liked the Enterprise manager interface so much better ... very light on resources too.
SSIS sucks
Dave
Posted on: 6/19/2008 4:56 PM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
Oh yes, SSIS sucks big time. How 'bout this for some suckage:

1. Tiny text entry points for conditional split conditions (and many other places). I have to key my conditions into a text editor and copy/past them into this POS.

2. The most freaking common things to do in data land are like getting a root canal in SSIS, starting with importing an Excel SS into a non-unicode table. What, MS does not know that my table is not unicode and that Excel is? I'll take implicit conversion any day that I AM IN A BIG FREAKING HURRY. And any anal retentive C# (otherwise known as fake C++) programmer that says otherwise can...

3. Today's suckage of the moment: I'm doing an incremental load of dozens of tables with hundreds of fields whose structure I am not familiar with, and the conditional split is pissing and moaning about conditions that evaluate to NULL, with no way to globally handle the situation. SSIS sucks to an unimagineable height on this one.

What, does MS not know how common incremental loads are? I should just be able to select my source and dest and press the @#$%#@ button. Thanks for nothing MS weiners.
MS Shill
Posted on: 6/25/2008 12:48 PM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
There is nothing wrong with SSIS. This just proves that microsoft programmers are the best and you guys who hate it are linux fanboys.
Knut Bohn
Posted on: 6/30/2008 2:58 PM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
I finally succumbed to the ever mounting urge to Google "SSIS piece of s*** and I just have to get this off my chest... I can't even begin to list all the issues where SSIS is a complete dud; from the simplest tasks of transferring/copying to the unbelievably complex implementation, winning combination of ubiquitous & impenetrable security. MS; please replace this sorry excuse of a tool!!
(And I don't even feel better, cause I still don't understand what this transfer server objects task is whining about - in the task properties I alerady told you: DO NOT COPY ANYTHING I DIDN'T TELL YOU TO COPY!!!) Good grief.
Knut Bohn
Posted on: 6/30/2008 3:09 PM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
Followup after more successful google:
"I'm not able to copy objects with the 'transfer SQL server object Task'. I opened a call as a Microsoft Premier-support customer. No chance to run a package without errors. Microsoft said, they know the errors but they will be corrected in SQL2k8.
"
MS Shill: I don't know what you've done with your SSIS, but mine - there's practically nothing right with it. And I'm a BIG fan of sotware that works - regardless of who made it...
Glen D'Abate
Posted on: 7/2/2008 11:28 AM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
SSIS is perhaps the most poorly conceived software upgrade Microsoft has ever release. I've asked staff to perform a few basic tasks that an untrained program could typically complete in less than 30 minutes using DTS. The same basic tasks (e.g., exporting a table to a flat file and reordering columns) take our new employees an average of more than 10 times the time to accomplish (when they can complete the task at all!). Microsofts in their never ending quest to bloat software packages with "features" has missed the mark with SSIS. They need to get out of their ivory towers and find out how the real world uses their products before releasing new versions.
Mark Phillips
Posted on: 7/21/2008 3:13 AM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
I have been working with SSIS around 6 months now and its not as bad as you make out. Its a vast improvement from DTS. Yes I agree there are nuances in the development environment and debugging but I think there is a bit of a learning curve and it is not something you can start using immediately - it takes some time to learn. At least there is now a lot more discussion and real world examples out there now.
Franklin Edwards
Posted on: 8/14/2008 9:21 PM
# re: SSIS Tries So Hard To Make You Hate It
Buggy, unstable, user unfriendly. A huge disappointment. I needed to add a gig of ram just to be able to use the client tools. If this is what 5 years of work produces then I don't want to see what is offered in 2008.