DTS to SSIS migration

Today I saw a new product coming soon to do DTS to SSIS migration called DtsXchange.

Looks promising and this is also capable to do something extra which built-in DTS migration doesn’t do like Dynamic Properties. Have a look here http://www.pragmaticworks.com/dtsxchange.htm


Users can also migrate existing DTS packages into SSIS using the FREE migration wizard provided by SQL Server 2005 but this wizard doesn’t cover complete DTS package. So in some cases manual effort is required, and SSIS doesn’t support some of the DTS features, so the user has to manually implement the functionality in new SSIS package.

You can find some known issues in migration here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143462.aspx


But on top of this SSIS allows you to run the existing DTS package even without any change, using a wrapper called “Execute DTS 2000 Package Task” in the new SSIS package.

So if you don’t have the bandwidth to migrate the existing package then keep on running the old DTS packages in SSIS and start making new packages in SSIS.

Obviously you will miss the “All NEW SSIS” but it’s an easy work around. But I think you will miss a lot, because SSIS is NOT a new name of DTS but it's a truly enterprise level ETL tool. So its always better to migrate to SSIS as soon as possible.


- Mohit Nayyar