There’s been an update of the SSIS extension for Visual Studio 2019. There are some bug fixes and deployments are blocked to Azure-SSIS if the target server version is not SQL Server 2017, but the real killer feature is the ability to now skip validation of an SSIS package when you open it.
This might not seem like much, but I had a project where there were many connections to different source databases. Sometimes, a couple of them were offline. Every time I opened up a package, the connections were validated. Because some of them were offline, I had to wait for the time-out and then the connection manager would be put offline. Opening up a package could easily take a minute or more. With this feature, packages now open up in a few seconds. It has already saved me a lot of frustration 🙂
So how does it work? You install the latest version of the extension. You open up Visual Studio, you go to Tools > Options. Go to the section Business Intelligence Designers, then Integration Services Designers and then General.
You’ll find an option under Skip package validation. It’s deselected by default.
Just enable it and enjoy the ride!
p.s.: the official blog post says it should also work with SSDT for VS2017 15.9.6, but I haven’t tried it out yet.
p.p.s: this is something different than the DelayValidation property you can set on various object inside a package. This property delays validation of the object at runtime, until the object itself is actually used. Useful when you use expressions on those objects. The setting described in this blog post is a design-time feature.
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That seemed promising, but it just deferred the hang-up until it was time to validate the Excel Connection when mapping its columns. Validating Excel Source Fills about 85-90% of a progress bar then hangs forever. This happens using a local drive or one on the share, even if the data flow task is the only thing in the package.