SSIS Packages Version Controlling.

Question

Hello All

Is there a good way of version controlling SSIS packages.

Any suggestions / ideas please

thanks

Answer 1

The only way I found is to just make changes to the package and commit it to TFS. This way you can have some sense of versions, as long as you keep updating what the changes were between the new version and the previous version.

Unfortunately, since I haven't found a way to copy/paste between dataflows, just within a dataflow, the only way to fix an introduced bug is to go back to an earlier version and reimplement the new feature, without causing the new bug.

Answer 2

StarTeam is another option for source control, too. We used that at a previous client, and it worked well.

Answer 3

I would recommend the Smart Diff feature in BIDS Helper. This is very useful for comparing two versions of a package to see what has changed.

The standard Visual Studio compare functionality is not very helpful in this regard. BIDS Helper does a much better job because it prepares canonical versions of both files (this includes splitting long lines of XML) before doing the comparison.