Item: Microsoft Visual Studio
Rating: 9
Author: Steve Mayer

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It began as use for a specific project in 2012 at DECAL and in the past few years has now been used more broadly for several cross-departmental requirements. We use VS for SSIS and SSAS project development.

Pros and Cons

SSIS processes records in an orderly manner.
SSIS has many sources and destination choices and we have extended the base SSIS features using a product called Task Factory from SentryOne/Pragmatic Works.

The major complaint I have with Visual Studio is that the user interface does not handle screen movement well at all if the SSIS steps extend beyond a single screen. It is very cumbersome to move steps around and you cannot even double click on a step to edit it because after the first click the step moves and you wind up opening a different step which happens to be wherever the cursor lands just prior to your second click. It is very frustrating and if Microsoft developers are reading this and my description of the problems are not clear, then I would be happy to discuss this on a phone call or via email to ensure these issues are fixed.

Return on Investment

We have had very positive results with the data warehouse project for which we used SSIS and SSAS. We provide data for our Research team and the senior management team of our agency they can use to make better-informed decisions.