SSIS Warning Framework versus SSAS Warning Framework

Most of us would have seen tons of warnings in the execution results / progress tab of the SSIS package designer, when we would have adopted a lazy development methodology. For example, select all the columns from a table and do not use it, and execute the package. You should see a lot of warning in the progress tab. Of course it's a good sign, but one side effect of it is that it overloads the progress tab with tons of warnings which makes the progress tab overpopulated. Many a times it also happens that one might be aware of the design, but there is no easy way to skip from the warnings. Undo in SSIS package, equivalent of SSAS "Deployment Server Edition" property and Warning Infrastructure similar to SSAS are some of the improvements required in SSIS designer environment, in my views. Undo is hear to be available in the next version, but rest of the two are doubtful to be available.

SSAS designer environment provides great control over the warning framework. This was not that great in 2005 version, but with the enhancements available in 2008 version, the control is completely of a professional level. In fact by placing the control of warning framework in the hands of the developer, SSAS team has almost eliminated the need for a best practices analyzer kind of tool for SSAS. If you edit the SSAS database and check out the "Warnings" tab, you can see all the design time best practices applied, understand the same as well as control which design time decisions you want to apply in your solution and want to see warnings in violation of the same. This control keeps a check on the number of warnings that pops-up during design time, and instead of missing vital warnings in the heap of warnings collection, a developer can actually start treating warnings with same importance as one would treat an error message. If this kind of support is available in SSAS, I do feel that it should not be that hard for SSIS development team to provide the same level of support in SSIS development environment.

With these kind of support, this would make the progress report more clean and controlled. I hope someone from Microsoft SSIS development team gets an eye on this post, though it would clearly reflect my greedy demands :) BTW, I wish all my blog readers a very Happy & Prosperous Diwali ( Festival of Lights celebrated in India ).