DTS xChange Profiler
Before your migration project starts, find out quickly what
you're about to jump into. DTS xChange offers a detailed profiling
tool that allows you to scope out your DTS migration project. It's
perfect for project managers, DBA managers, consultants or anyone
interested in determining how much of an effort the migration is
going to be.

See
Larger Image of Estimation
|
After selecting the packages
you wish to profile, DTS xChange will prompt you to
determine how long each type of DTS task takes you to
migrate. The program has built in
estimates already in place but this gives you an opportunity
to tune the program for your staff expertise. You also
specify on this screen what the cost of your employee(s)
will be to convert the packages. |

See Larger Image of Profiler Report |
After you estimate the hours
to convert each type of task, DTS xChange will profile your
set of packages and output a detailed report of the project
effort. It will show the estimated hours to convert your set
of packages you passed in as well as an estimated cost. The
report is printable and exportable into a number of key
formats (PDF and Excel for example) to help you integrate it
fully into your project plan.
Also inside the report are the details of what each
DTS task does and how it is configured. If you use ActiveX
Script Tasks in your DTS package, DTS xChange will review
the objects that you are using inside your task and give you
guidance on how to convert those tasks to a like task inside
of SSIS.
See Profiler Video
Demonstration |
DTS xChange Migration
Before your migration project starts, find out quickly what
you're about to jump into. DTS xChange offers a detailed profiling
tool that allows you to scope out your DTS migration project. It's
perfect for project managers, DBA managers, consultants or anyone
interested in determining how much of an effort the migration is
going to be.

See
Larger Image of Migration Rule Selection
|
DTS xChange will first
prompt you where your packages are located at. Packages can
be read from a directory of .DTS package files or from a SQL
Server 2000 machine. You're also asked where you wish the
output of the wizard to be written. SQL Server 2005 and
2008 are both supported and packages can be automatically
deployed to your SQL Server or just written to your file
system.
Conversion of your packages can occur one by one or you
could do hundreds at a time. Whichever method you choose,
the next screen will ask you what rules you wish to apply to
the packages as they're converted. The rule framework was
built from best practices pioneered from converting
thousands of packages to SSIS. For example, one of the rules
you may want to enable is to turn on checkpointing in SSIS
or to enable logging or transactions. |

See Larger Image of Migration Report |
After the rules are
configured, the packages will begin to migrate. Migration
can optionally validate each of the SSIS packages after
migration. Validation will connect to the various sources
and destinations that are used in package to confirm that
the package will actually work once run in production. This
is not the same as a full test with execution but it goes a
long way to helping with that testing.
After the migration, you're also presented a detailed log of
what was done and anything that failed. If there were any
validation warnings, you will see those in a separate tab in
this screen. A sample validation warning may be that your
table that the package is referring to does not exist or the
database is invalid.
See Migration Wizard Video
Demonstration |
SSIS Logging Enterprise Logging
DTS xChange also offers a series of solutions to help you roll
out an enterprise operational data warehouse for SSIS operational
statistics. With the warehouse you can track how long each package
took by date, computer, environment (QA, Prod, etc), machine type,
and more. The solution reads from an enterprise logging table that
is created when you migrate the DTS packages by checking the rule.
Additionally, the solution provides you an Analysis Services (SSAS)
project to fully slice and dice the statistics. This solution is
perfect for capacity planning on your hardware to see how much
hardware will be needed next year for SSIS and for seeing what
aspects of your packages need to be tuned. You'll feel the impact of
this solution long after your DTS packages are migrated to SSIS and
even newly created SSIS packages can use this enterprise logging
warehouse.
Included in this solution:
- Enterprise logging schema for all of your packages to log to
(errors, warnings and completion of each step0
- A data warehouse to analyze the SSIS logs
- An SSIS package and project to load the data warehouse from
the enterprise logging schema
- A SQL Serer Analysis Services (SSAS) project to deploy on
top of the warehouse in order to slice and dice your package
logging
- A series of Reporting Services reports to view the data
Once the data is in a cube, you can view that data through any
cube browser such as Reporting Services, Excel, Cognos, Business
Objects or any other cube tool. This allows you to determine the
growth of SSIS in your environment by machine, environment, package
or date.
See SSIS Enterprise Logging Demonstration
DTS xChange Features
- Converts hundreds of DTS packages to SQL Server Integration
Services (SQL Server 2005 or 2008) in moments
- Validates packages after execution to ensure that they will
work upon execution
- Deploys packages automatically to SQL Server 2005 or 2008
- Handles nearly all tasks except for MSMQ and Data Driven
Query Tasks
- Applies a series of rules on DTS packages:
- Logging to text or SQL files
- Enable checkpoints
- Enable transactions
- Logging through event handlers into a robust event table
- Migrate children packages automatically
- Consolidate duplicate connections
- Create configuration files automatically
- Create sequence containers from parallel tasks
- Profiles packages for cost (man hours and hard cost) of
migrations
- Converts SQL Native Client connections
- Can handle ODBC connections as a source
- Convert UDL files to connection managers
- ActiveX Script Tasks are migrated to ActiveX Script Tasks in
SSIS. Use the Profiler to determine quickly which objects are
created inside the tasks and determine action items to migrate
the task.
Pricing
DTS xChange will be released in early October and is licensed by
developer for unlimited package migrations for that developer at a
site. Site or consultant licenses are also available. Full pricing
will be available on this page after the product release. If you
have any questions, please contact us at
info@pragmaticworks.com.

Comparison to the DTS Migration Wizard
Included in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 is an existing DTS Migration
Wizard that's less than 30% successful. The below table shows you a
comparison between the built in wizard and DTS xChange. To see a
complete comparison list, please see our
complete comparison documentation.
| Feature |
DTS xChange Support |
DTS Migration Wizard Support |
| Conversion of Execute SQL Task |
Y |
Y |
| Conversion of Execute Process Task |
Y |
Y |
| Conversion of Data Pump Task |
Y |
Sometimes |
| Conversion of Dynamic Properties Task |
Y |
N |
| ODBC Support |
Y as a Source |
N |
| UDL File Support |
Y |
N |
| Password protected Access Database |
Y |
N |
| Flat File that doesn't map all columns |
Y |
N |
| Data conversion between source and destination |
Y |
N |
| SQL Native Client support |
Y |
N |
| Full package validation after migration |
Y |
N |
| Migration of Send Mail Task to its SMTP equivalent |
Y |
N |
| Detailed logs of conversion |
Y |
N |
| Enterprise rules for migration to get the benefit of
SSIS |
Y |
N |
| SSIS logging turned on |
Y |
N |
| Checkpoint file support |
Y |
N |
| Children package migration |
Y |
N |
| Profiling capability |
Y |
N |
|