I’ve done a lot of consulting work over the last several years but one thing I’ve noticed that every single client is interested in is using best practices. Whether we’re talking about building SSRS reports, designing a data warehouse, building a 2 TB cube, or designing an ETL solution for a large data warehouse, everyone wants to use best practices. But its easier said than done. How do you enforce best practice rules across your organization? BI xPress attempts to remedy that problem with its SSIS Best Practices Analyzer.

The great part of the BI xPress SSIS Best Practices Analyzer is that you have the option to create your very own custom rules to enforce across your organization. Of course the tool comes packed with a list of rules put together by our team of ETL developers, but you also have the option to create your own rules to add to and improve upon our list of best practices. Very cool stuff!

Basically the way the tool works is very simple. BI xPress reads the properties of the packages you wish to enforce your organization’s best practices on and tests the properties based on the rules you’ve defined. For example, imagine your organization follows a specific naming convention for each and every component in your SSIS package. Simply create the rule that checks for proper naming convention using Rule Create dialogue.

After you’ve created your rules based on your teams best practices, its very easy to check your existing SSIS package to verify that they are utilizing best practices.

You can use your custom rules your team has developed or you can use the included rules put together by our team of consultants for those of you that are looking for best practice recommendations. If you’re looking to standardize yours SSIS packages and development life cycle, I’d encourage you to take a look at the BI xPress SSIS Best Practices Analyzer. Head over to PragmaticWorks.com for a free trial download.