A dtsdoc user reported that some properties of the transform data task were missing in the documentation. Now they are included. It also fixes a couple of minor bugs.

As always this is a free upgrade.

dbdesc 3.1

Even though dbdesc supports SQL Server 2008 since RC0, it was not able to document CREATE TABLE scripts. Finally dbdesc is able to pick the latest SMO version and produce those scripts. If you try to document a SQL 2008 database from a machine without SQL Server 2008 you’ll need to install this component from Microsoft: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management Objects. If this component is not available, the database will be documented just fine but table scripts will be missing.

dtsdoc 1.2.4

When using Data Driven Query Tasks or a Data Pump Tasks, you can apply some transformations to the data. The usual transformations are copying columns and running an ActiveX script. However there are others like ReadFile, WriteFile, UpperCaseString, and others. These transformations happen to have its own custom properties, and previous versions of dtsdoc were not documenting them.

This version also shows the package names of a server sorted alphabetically. You could do that before simply by clicking the list header, but an anonymous user asked why there were not sorted this way in the first place. Very true.

A few days ago I’ve received a great email from Hugo Toledo, a long time dtsdoc customer. This time I’ve decided to share it with you here:

Hello folks,

I wanted to share with you another recent dtsdoc-based success.

We have had to go back and analyze a transformation problem in an older application. Thanks to dtsdoc we were able to very, very quickly determine that a typo had occurred during a recent and, one would think, minor update.

Without dtsdoc this could have taken hours and, because of the tedium of the effort, we may very well have missed a few more places where it occurred.

Thanks, again!

Hugo Toledo
Principal
Chateaux Software

Now the DTS call tree image automatically increases its width so package names don’t wrap. It makes the image easier to read.

This version also adds a new version of the HTML_Images XSL template which presents the packages ordered alphabetically and fixes a small error in the templates.

Feel free to download this update from the download page. The installer will automatically upgrade any previous version of dtsdoc.

“I am a fan of simple tools which work well and save me a lot of time. Two of my “new best friends” are Logica2′s sister programs dtsdoc, which documents SQL Server DTS packages, and dbdesc, which documents SQL Server schemas. The documentation is complete and generated quickly, and both programs have found a lasting place in my SQL Server toolkit.”

The article is a very good introduction to both products. Thanks Richard for the positive comments.

To begin with, this exception cannot be catched, which means you don’t get a nice call stack or any other useful info to track down the problem.

If you dig in MSDN you will find this explanation: “The exception that is thrown when there is an internal error in the execution engine of the common language runtime.”, not very helpful.

Finally if you google about it, you’ll find lots of exasperated people looking for answers but almost no solutions at all. One thing that seems to share all those posts is that they are trying to do some kind of interop with COM objects.

To make a long story short, it was a bug in the Microsoft DTS libraries that dtsdoc uses to inspect and document DTS packages. The bug is fixed in SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4, so updating those libraries solved the problem.

So, if you run into some RuntimeExecutionException, check your unmanaged libraries first, chances are that any of those libraries has a bug.

These are the main features added to dbdesc 1.6:

• Create statements for tables
• List of “dependent tables” which have foreign keys referring to the table
• View’s fields documented
• Triggers on views documented
• INSTEAD OF triggers
• Stored procedure parameters documented
• Index properties added: IS_UNIQUE and IS_CLUSTERED
• New option to include/exclude object definitions
• New option to insert a page break after each object in the built-in report
• Added key-accelerators to dbdesc GUI
• Improved error handling
• XSL templates updated

About dtsdoc 1.2:

This version adds only one new main feature, but I think it’s going to be really useful for some of you so I decided to release it early.

dtsdoc now generates an image with the parent/child relationships among your packages. It looks for your DTSExcutePackage tasks and tries to navigate them to build the image.

I’ve included some minor bug fixes and enhancements as well, like additional links and package labeling in the report.

As a quick summary of the new features added to this version, dtsdoc now documents the workflow scripts, step precedence constraints and extracts basic properties from OlapProcess and Prediction tasks. I’ve added a new section that should help take a general overview of the task execution sequence. It lists the steps that will be called when OnCompletion, OnSuccess and OnFailure events are triggered.

It also adds ‘nice-to-have’ features like syntax highlighting on SQL, JScript and VBScript code, multiple package documentation in one file and a nicer HTML template with images support.

It’s a very positive review and it has brought some users interested in dtsdoc. I’ve got a lot of great feedback and suggestions not only from the review but from the traffic it has generated.

dtsdoc has already made some sales in its first two weeks, which is more than I expected for version 1.0. I’m pretty confident about the future of dtsdoc.

I got the idea to develop this product after several requests from dbdesc users who wanted to document their DTS packages.

At first, I considered adding this functionality to dbdesc, but soon I realise that it would mean to do a major redesign of the interface and to loose focus: document databases. Besides this, only a small part of the people who has to deal with SQL Server actually uses Data Transformation Services. So the choice was obvious.

If you work with DTS packages give dtsdoc a try. I will appreciate any feedback.