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some thoughts... - October, 2007
IT makes the world go round - and sometimes stops it...
 
 Thursday, October 25, 2007

Rodney Landrum demonstrates an ingenious way to monitor blocked SQL Server processes across all your servers, using nothing but SSRS in his posting "The Reporting Services 3-Trick Pony"

Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:44:27 PM (Mitteleuropäische Zeit, UTC+01:00)  #     Author:Markus Fischer   Comments [0]   |  |   | 

Darren Gosbell has published his presentation and a sample project with demos he presented at the SQL Down Under Code Camp.

This really is worth downloading and reading!

And Darren had a very well-fitting picture about the feelings while building the first SSIS package while coming from DTS for example:

Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:40:08 PM (Mitteleuropäische Zeit, UTC+01:00)  #     Author:Markus Fischer   Comments [0]   |   | 

Sam Battermann has posted about a really fascinating video using a webcam and a WPF application to create some tremendous effects:

Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:05:16 PM (Mitteleuropäische Zeit, UTC+01:00)  #     Author:Markus Fischer   Comments [0]   |   | 

I recently had to download some flatfiles from different FTP Resources to load these into a SQL database.

Being a fan of package configurations and minimized maintenance I decided to build a package which would loop through a recordset containing the necessary informations like FTP server, port, user and password instead of creating different packages or steps for each FTP server.

excursion:
I know that storing passwords in a database table is not really best practice for security, but the guys being responsible for the SQL Server are also responsible for the FTP server... :-)

So, extracting the informations with a SQL Task, including a loop and using expressions to set the correct properties would not be a great challenge I thought. Up to the moment I tried to select the property for the password from the Property Expressions Editor in BIDS:

There is no property which could be used to set the password via expression - this must be a security feature to enable FTP tasks to be "secure by default"...

So what do to do?
Searching the properties for the password prop I recognized that there is a property for the connection - though I should use this for the loop approach instead of building several tasks? But what would be the correct usage of the connection?

Once again like every day in the life of an IT guy I used the "tool which must not be named" [@Microsoft: why don't you find search results even in your own resources???] and et voilà I got the perfect hint in the SSIS forum of MSDN.

The correct syntax for the connection would be Server IP:Port.loginAccount.loginPWD, therefor you could use an expression like this:

@[user::FtpServer] + ":" + @[user::FtpServerPort] +"."+ @[user::FtpAcct] +"."+ @[user::FtpPwd]

to build this connection string. And if you use another variable to build the string - do not forget to set the "evaluate as expression" to TRUE...

Thursday, October 25, 2007 2:37:20 PM (Mitteleuropäische Zeit, UTC+01:00)  #     Author:Markus Fischer   Comments [0]   |   | 
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