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;

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:

SSIS - Kimball SCD Component vs. SCD Component

Some of you certainly know the performance issue of using the Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) SSIS component.
With a small or medium amount of records, this component works fine but with a bigger amount of data, I’m speaking here about more than 10000 records (which is not huge J), this component “sucks”.

Here at Mobistar I encountered this kind of issue because I had to import more or less 80000 records per day.

By using the SCD component, after 40 minutes I decided to stop the loading and starting to find another solution.
By using the Kimball SCD component, the loading takes a bit more than 2 minutes.

The Kimball SCD component receives input from 2 sorted sources, compares the data and updates, inserts or deletes the records into the destination table. Furthermore, the Kimball SCD applies an insert or update against all rows at the same time. The normal SCD applies the update or the insert against a single row at the time. This is why the normal SCD is slower than the Kimball SCD.

I guess this component could interesting you a lot in your future developments.

Feel free to send me your experience with this component.

http://kimballscd.codeplex.com/

Kind regards,
Jérémie
PS: you can also have a look to http://www.sqlbi.eu/Projects/TableDifference/tabid/74/language/en-US/Default.aspx for information about another improved SCD component