Tuesday, October 26, 2004

DTS Programming


Let's be honest. It's, er, challenging;to code against the DTS object model. But a lot of the reason is because DTS--oops, Integration Services--is not really a set of objects, but rather a development platform with two primary engines, the runtime engine (for control flow) and the pipeline engine (for data flow). All the tasks and transforms are "plug-ins" that somebody wrote to fit into one of the two main engines. Once you get that distinction clear, and pay close attention to when you are writing to the DTS engine, and when you are writing to the plug-in componen; much of the confusion goes away.


I started using a pseudo-hungarian naming convention where the last letter of the prefix was 'o' for the 'outer' or engine object, and 'i' for the 'inner' or plug-in object. Once I did that, I realized that there was a remarkable pattern going. All the communication with the 'outer' object is essentially the same, regardless of what you're creating, and the 'inner' object code is where the uniqueness of the plug-in reveals itself.


Perhaps that's why they decided to give DTS a fancy new name.


- Reed


No comments: