5 Minutes of BI: Documenting SSIS in BIDS
BIDS is the Business Intelligence Development Studio for the Microsoft BI toolset (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS). Coming from an App Developer background, I am a strong supporter of documentation. Being a consultant, many of my engagements start with reviewing and assessing the clients’ existing BI solutions. Believe it or not, documentation is usually nonexistent.
I am not going to write about all the benefits of documentation in this post as the goal of these 5 Minutes Series is to be short and straight to the point. This episode is about SSIS Annotations.
SSIS Annotations are a great way to document SSIS packages. There is a property on almost all SSIS components called ‘Description’, which is intended to also document SSIS packages. However, it is somewhat hidden(as well as many others SSIS components properties anyways) and many developers are not even aware of it being available .
One advantage of using Annotations over the Description is in their visibility.
You can go as far as describing the process and also providing a better insight to what is going on under the wood of such components like Execute SQL Tasks.
One undocumented little trick with SSIS Annotations is the CTRL+ENTER short keys combination that allows you to hop to the next line.
That’s it for today’s 5 Minutes of BI. If you have questions or comments, please go ahead and let’s discuss.
Aloha! I’ve just stopped by to thank you for this interesting article. Take care!