SSIS temporary storage

  • I am running an SSIS package on my laptop - which connects to a server

    I am doing a data import - across different databases (on different servers)

    I have been monitoring the destination database file size - and I dont see it increasing as the data is being inserted.... the database size increases only after the ssis package executes successfully.

    Where is the data being stored duting package execution? I am curious to know what resorces are used up in ssis package execution - my laptop? or the server?

    If answer is the server, then, if there is a data conversion task for the import, where does that happen? laptop? server?

  • Almost everything in SSIS takes place in memory on the machine the package is running on. If you are running your package as a single transaction then the database is not going to grow until the transaction is complete.

  • great. That is what I kinda suspected.... so if I am going to transfer 200GB of data and run the package from my laptop (which has 50GB available) it would fail?

    Is there a way to not do this as a transaction - just plain direct insert? are those options available in ssis? I know bcp could specify the number of records to process at a time... is that possible with ssis (which I think uses bulk insert)?

    Thank you very much for your reply.

  • It won't fail as SSIS does things on a row by row basis so you do not need to have 200GB of storage on the machine where the package is running. The package is inserting the data, writing to the destination database transaction log, then the database is writing the inserts to the database file. You should see your transaction log growing during the process.

    I am sure that there are others who can better explain exactly how SSIS works, but the key thing you need to know is that the machine running the package basically is just using RAM and CPU. If there are any lookups then the package may use tempdb on the server that the lookup is from.

  • I have been monitoring the transaction log... it hasn't grown past 500mb. I am inserting 9million rows from a table with 250 columns! Database size grows by 10-12GB. Maybe it's putting it in the server's tempdb but I cant think of a way to check that (Server has a 16 processor - so I set it up with 16 tempdb files of 2GB each)

    Interesting though. Thank you for your reply. If I ever find out for sure, I will post back here

  • what is the major difference between dts and ssis packages??

  • the major difference is that they threw out DTS and wrote SSIS from the ground up. It's completely different.

    Jamie Thompson has written an excellent blog on this which may help... http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Server+2005+-+SSIS/thenewetlparadigm/1719/

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