Add 26 High Powered Tasks to your SSIS Toolbox

As a Business Intelligence Consultant with Pragmatic Works, I have the pleasure of being able to take for a spin any of the sports cars in the garage of Pragmatic Works software. And if you’ve frequented my blog before, you’ve heard about how much I love using BI xPress to speed up my SSIS package development. One of the coolest pieces of software out of Pragmatic Works is Task Factory.

Task Factory is a collection of high performance SSIS tasks that allows you to add and extend layers of functionality to your SSIS packages. One of the most powerful transforms that is included with Task Factory is the Dimension Merge SCD, formerly known as the Kimball SCD transform.

Dim Merge SCD

The Dimension Merge SCD transform is 100 X faster at handling Type 1 and Type 2 slowly changing dimensions than the native Microsoft SCD component which uses the slow-as-mess OLE DB Command transform. Being able to handle very large dimensions up to several million rows makes the Dimension Merge SCD included with Task Factory one of the most powerful transforms included with Task Factory. The Dimension Merge SCD offers the power and flexibility of the Kimball SCD with the support of the expert staff at Pragmatic Works.

One of my personal favorite new transformations just recently added to Task Factory is the Regex Replace transform.

Regex Replace

Previous to the development of the Regex Replace transform, I would have to use a Script Component and write some code to use regular expressions. But with the Regex Replace transform, I can easily and quickly use reg ex to either replace reg ex matched data or extract the reg ex matched data to a new column or the existing column.

The newest version of Task Factory includes 26 SSIS tasks and transforms that definitely are worth taking a look at. And if you’re even a little bit familiar with Pragmatic Works, you know of our dedication to the SQL community. With that said, Pragmatic Works offers a completely free Community Edition version of Task Factory, which includes five tasks and transforms such as the File Properties Task and the Data Validation Transform. Go here to download the latest version of Task Factory.