SSIS 2005 Control Flow Priority

Question

The short version is I am looking for a way to prioritize certain tasks in SSIS 2005 control flows. That is I want to be able to set it up so that Task B does not start until Task A has started but Task B does not need to wait for Task A to complete. The goal is to reduce the amount of time where I have idle threads hanging around waiting for Task A to complete so that they can move onto Tasks C, D & E.

The issue I am dealing with is converting a data warehouse load from a linear job that calls a bunch of SPs to an SSIS package calling the same SPs but running multiple threads in parallel. So basically I have a bunch of Execute SQL Task and Sequence Container objects with Precedent Constraints mapping out the dependencies. So far no problems, things are working great and it cut our load time a bunch.

However I noticed that tasks with no downstream dependencies are commonly being sequenced before those that do have dependencies. This is causing a lot of idle time in certain spots that I would like to minimize.

For example: I have about 60 procs involved with this load, ~10 of them have no dependencies at all and can run at any time. Then I have another one with no upstream dependencies but almost every other task in the job is dependent on it. I would like to make sure that the task with the dependencies is running before I pick up any of the tasks with no dependencies. This is just one example, there are similar situations in other spots as well.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I don't know any elegant ways to do this but my first shot would be something like this..

Sequence Container with the proc that has to run first. In that same sequence container put a script task that just waits 5-10 seconds or so before each of the 10 independent steps can run. Then chain the rest of the procs below that sequence container.