Thursday, May 31, 2012

SSIS Error - Invalid Number ORA-01722

After 5 years,  a select statement on a Oracle 10 database starts to fail...with the error message ORA-01722: Invalid Number.

Hum, strange error message and not really usefull.

I read lots of post and sometimes it was due to an issue with the connector (http://www.attunity.com/forums/microsoft-ssis-oracle-connector/known-limitation-number-fields-1305.html), due  to datatype mismatch (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqlintegrationservices/thread/9acb1c36-bfaf-40eb-bb6e-3a91eeea96ec) or due to other reasons.

In my case, the issue cames from a TO_NUMBER casting that we did to convert a string datatype to a number...I know it'sstupid to create keys as string but I'm not responsible of that ;-)

So let's continue the explanation...first I started to execute the query by removing all the selected fields.
The query ran fine.
Than I added, one by one the selected fields till the error occured again. Like this I was able to identify the column that caused the issue.

Second I remarked that I did a conversion using TO_NUMBER...May it be possible that some values in the source database are not numbers?

I executed again the query without converting the values and was able then to see that one row had the value 'PHONECALL' as key number! Very funny. So I have identified the bug.

Now go to the solution...

1) The workaround: adding a selection criteria in the where clause that avoid selecting rows where the values length is smaller than the expected length.
2) The solution: Asking to the DBA to create a function that detect if a value is a number or not like here follow:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION is_number
( p_str IN VARCHAR2 )  
RETURN VARCHAR2 IS l_num NUMBER;
BEGIN  
l_num := to_number( p_str );  
RETURN 'Y';
EXCEPTION      
RETURN 'N';
END is_number;

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

SSIS vs. SQL Stored Procedure

Recently I was asking by the customer to redesign a sequence of stored procedures that were used to load and transform data. This because the performance was not as expected due to the increasing of the mount of data.

Here the observations I will share with you:

  • Use SSIS to extract and load data from one or mutliple sources to one destination or multiple destinations.
  • Use a stored procedure to update the data instead of using e.g. a SCD component.
  • Use SQL Statement for grouping, filtering or sorting a query result instead of e.g. a Sort component
  • If the data to join comes from different sources then extract and load first the data in tables of the same e.g Staging area and then use a SQL Select statement where the join conditions will be indexed.
A right indexation and statistics will be the key of success!

Thursday, March 29, 2012

How To: Run a package having an Excel connector in BIDS 2008 and above 64bits

Hi,

What do you have to change to be able to execute a package where the error message says:

Error: 0xC020801C at Data Flow Task, Excel Source [1]: SSIS Error Code DTS_E_CANNOTACQUIRECONNECTIONFROMCONNECTIONMANAGER. The AcquireConnection method call to the connection manager "Excel Connection Manager" failed with error code 0xC0202009. There may be error messages posted before this with more information on why the AcquireConnection method call failed.


?

Most of time, Excel is installed as a 32bits software but you try to execute a package in a 64bits BIDS installation.

To avoid this stupid error message, you have set the Run64BitRuntime property to false as shown in the below picture: