Diet Projects

I’m currently trying to put together a full end to end demo of SQL Server 2005 based on an existing implementation I’m working on (You could call it my own little Project Real Lite). This is an Oracle data warehouse with Microsoft presentation tools and as I really need to demonstrate all aspects of SQL Server 2005 I need to pull the data out of Oracle and into the database engine so first up is SSIS.

Good tool this, very good and with the help of an expert I know who I’m trying to convince to start blogging it’s going quite well. But, there’s always a “but” pulling Oracle data out with SSIS has proved trickier than it shouldn’t have been. Yes I know I’ve cut a few corners to speed the process up but numerical data appears to be coming out as numeric(38,4) and trying to any data conversion to other numerical data using the derived column component is causing it to fail consistently. I’ve managed to get it working but I have to do something pretty evil and convert the data. First to a string in the select statement then back into decimal in the derived column component, the overhead is obvious but I should only have to do this once and when I’m all done I think I’ll reinvestigate all the little irritations I’m finding.

I'm sure i'm just missing something that a little preperation couldn't solve but it's still a somewhat odd.