I had to work on providing an effort estimate to convert multiple DTS packages into corresponding SSIS packages. An automated conversion tool was not available to us so the SSIS packages were to be built from scratch based on the existing DTS packages.
I took this opportunity to catalog all our DTS packages and created an Excel workbook to aid in the estimation. The formulas in the workbook calculate the effort in person-days for the rewrite of the current DTS logic into a SSIS package.
I approached this requirement as follows –
Open each DTS package and used the Excel workbook to make an inventory of the type and number of all the tasks and connections in the package. Obviously, this is a repetitive and the most time consuming activity in the whole process.
Decide on an estimated number of minutes required to recreate each type of task/connection in SSIS. This time could vary depending on the developer’s experience and skill.
Lastly, put in standard time additions for activities like analysis, error handling, logging and documentation.
You can try that estimation workbook by downloading it at the link give below and tweaking the values to suit your needs. While you are there, don’t forget to rate it! 🙂 Please let me know in the comments section of this post if there are any suggestions or questions.
Developers use comments within the code primarily for two purposes –
Documentation (for posterity)
Debugging (making quick comparisons of the impact of a change without discarding the original code)
It depends on the team’s culture and their coding standards as to how much they choose to comment for documentation. Ideally, there should be a change history included as a header at the top of the code and additional comments to highlight why a particular logic was used. Another developer (or even the original) can look at the code and understand what is it doing, but sometimes it is not apparent why was that particular implementation chosen over others. So it is a good idea to mention the rationale behind using a particular logic. Other interesting paradigms can be checked on the Wikipedia article on Comments in Programming.
TSQL supports two types of comments –
Single-line comments: These start with a double hyphen ‘- -‘ and the rest of the code on that line till the new-line (or carriage return) character is considered to be a comment.
Multi-line comments: These start with a ‘/*’ and end with a ‘*/’ either on the same line of the code or on another line and everything in between these two is considered to be a comment.
The implementation of comments has not changed much between various editions of SQL Server but there have been few considerations. The MSDN article for comments syntax in SQL Server 2000 mentions that comments cannot span multiple batches. If the batch delimiter keyword GO is within a multi-line comment then the ending */ will not be parsed correctly and cause syntax errors. The SQL Server 2005 or later versions could have issues when the ‘*/’ string is put in a multi-line comment. Try the code below in SQL Server 2005 or later versions to see an example –
Each comment type has its uses but I personally prefer and recommend using the multi-line syntax, even for short comments that could fit on a single line. My reason for that is that I frequently get requests to review queries and give suggestions on tuning them. Sometimes that query has been captured from DBCC INPUTBUFFER(spid) or the dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) DM function. Both of these do not preserve any formatting of the code. As a result I get the entire stored procedures’ code in one single long line!
I usually try to format such code using an excellent online code formatter by the name of SQLInForm. When the formatter comes across a double hyphen, it considers the rest of the line as a comment and leaves it as it is. At that point I have to make a choice either to painfully go through the remaining code and try to guess what is a comment and what is not. At times I send it back to the developer to provided a better fomatted code. Both these approaches increase the turnaround time for the whole tuning process.
If the developer had used the multi-line comment syntax in the first place, then the code formatter could have handled it and life would have been much easier.
You are using the query editor in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). You have spent an hour writing and tweaking a query. Then probably another 15 minutes to format it to your liking. But you haven’t saved it yet. If the SSMS crashes now before you could save your work, is all of your effort wasted? Maybe not. The in-built auto-recover features make it possible to recover unsaved queries after SSMS crash. I discuss all the manual or tool based recovery options in this article.
Auto-Recovery in SSMS
The SSMS developer team anticipated this situation so they have built in some auto recovery options in the tool. Usually, the next time you start SSMS after a crash, it tries to recover your unsaved queries. The recovered files show up in a dialog box as shown below. The dialog box has a list of files that SSMS was able to recover. You can select the files that you wish to salvage.
The file names are cryptic with no indication about their content. This kind of naming is ok if you were working with only one query window and know which query is being salvaged. But if you had multiple query windows open at the time of crash, the cryptic file names will be of no help. So you might want to recover all the files in this list and review them later. Next, make a note of the folder locations where the files will be recovered so that you can take a look at them. Now you can click the Recover Selected Files button.
SSMS Query Recover Dialog
What If Auto-Recovery Does Not Work
Sometimes SSMS may not present the recovery dialog box. It might seem that all the work is lost. Well, most of the queries (if not all) can still be recovered because the recovery dialog shows where are the backup files located.
Windows XP
On Windows XP, SSMS saves auto recover copies of queries as you work, in the folder –
C:/Documents and Settings/<user name>/My Documents/SQL Server Management Studio/Backup Files/Solution1
Windows 7
On Windows 7, the queries can be recovered from –
C:/Users/<user name>/Documents/SQL Server Management Studio/Backup Files/Solution1
Recovery Folder Content
The names of the auto saved files are cryptic. So you will need to open all the files to find the one you are interested in.
SSMS Query Auto Recover Location in Windows XP
Other Options
If auto recover does not work help for any reason, then here are a few more options.
SQL Server Query Cache
You can try recovering TSQL statement text using some of the DMVs and DMFs. The sys.dm_exec_requests along with sys.dm_exec_sql_text can show the statement text. But this is helpful only if you executed the query and the query is still in SQL Server’s memory. If the query text was just sitting in the editor and you never executed it before the SSMS crash then this method cannot help.
USE [your_database_name]
GO
SELECT
s.last_execution_time AS [ExecutionTime],
t.text AS [Statement]
FROM
sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS s
CROSS APPLY
sys.dm_exec_sql_text(s.sql_handle) AS t
ORDER BY
s.last_execution_time DESC
Third Party Tools
Some third party tools like SSMS Boost (free), Red Gate SQL Prompt (paid after trial), SSMS Tools Pack (paid after trial) etc. can help in a situation like this, but only if you had them installed and running at the time of the crash. They cannot help otherwise.
