SSIS Packages - Issues with version control and maintenance

Question

We have been developing SSIS packages for about a year now, and have 2 major issues associated with the maintenance of these packages :

1) We are using version control, but trying to identify the changes between versions of packages is a nightmare - the results of a text diff between 2 versions of a package is basically unusable.

2) For someone unfamiliar with a package the tools for helping with maintenance are not great. For example, trying to find where a particular column is being set up is not easy. The only search you can do is on the xml - you then have to reverse engineer that to work out where the column is being used

Does anyone have any ideas for tools/techniques to help with these problems?

Answer 1

You're right,SSIS is quite hard to maintain.

The only advise I can give you is to design your packages following the single responsibility principle. You'd end up with lots of small packages, but they'll be less likely to change, and will be easier to maintain when they do.

Answer 2

Did you try BIDS Helper? It does not solve all the issues with SSIS version control (which is horrible, I agree), but its Smart Diff makes diff'ing somewhat better.

http://bidshelper.codeplex.com/