We Stopped Teaching What We Never Stopped Running

[also posted at Andy Leonard’s blog]

tl;dr - Sign up for SSIS Premium, use the coupon code “eod-reader” and save 10%!

You didn’t learn SSIS in a classroom.

You learned it because someone left and the packages stayed. You learned it at 11:00 PM, reading a Control Flow that a contractor built in 2014, working out why the deployment succeeded and the load didn’t.

You inherited it.

This is the reality for many people running production data integration right now.

If you maintain an SSIS estate, some of this will feel familiar:

• Your conference has forty sessions on the platform you’re migrating toward and none on the platform that ran payroll last night

• A line in the training budget says “modernization,” so the thing carrying production gets nothing

• You know which package fails on the third Tuesday of each month, and you know it because it wakes you up on the third Tuesday of each month

• The best documentation for your data engineering estate is the margin notes in your own copy of a book

• New people don’t get onboarded - well, at least not well. They get apprenticed in the gaps between incidents

• You stopped asking for SSIS training somewhere around 2019, because you assumed the answer was a raised eyebrow

None of this is a you problem.
It’s a supply problem.
And it’s systemic.

Software engineering solved this years ago. Nobody blinks when a shop pays for deep training on a framework that shipped fifteen years back, because somebody is still running it, and running it well is a skill worth buying. There’s a whole economy around maintaining things that work.

Data integration mostly didn’t solve this. We decided teaching attention should follow the vendor roadmap instead of the production estate. And now we act surprised when the people holding said estate together have nowhere to go.

There are few advantages to living through 51 years of software development. One advantage? I have watched this cycle three or four times now:

A platform gets declared “over.”
The teaching dries up.
The platform keeps running for another decade (or two).

And the people who understand it get quietly more valuable and quietly more tired. The tired part is the problem. Not the valuable part.

The SSIS material at ssis.training was recorded a few years ago.

I could bury that. I opt to surface it because it’s part of my argument.

Go open a package you shipped last month. Now open one from 2020. Same control flow. Same data flow. Same catalog. Same project deployment model. Same parameters, same environments, same references. The extension moved to a newer Visual Studio and SQL Server rolled forward.

The surface you actually work on did not move.

This is what a stable platform looks like. This is why your estate is still running. This is also why SSIS training holds its value.

If the recordings had aged out, SSIS would have changed.

SSIS didn’t change that much at all.

(On the Enterprise Data & Analytics team, “SSIS is dying” has been a running joke for years. Every time we hit a bug, somebody says it, and we laugh at our silly selves. The joke keeps working because the premise keeps not happening...)

Visit - or have your boss visit - ssis.training to learn more about 35 hours of training I wrote based on my experience.

Instead of a migration pitch wearing a training costume, my training covers SSIS design patterns, automation, framework-think, SSIS catalog and lifecycle management - things that took me an embarrassing number of production incidents to work out the first time, arranged so you don’t have to repeat the incidents.

Inherited knowledge has holes in it by definition. You know the three patterns you were handed. You may not know the six you weren’t, or why the person before you chose the way they did, or what a deliberately designed version of your estate would look like. That Microsoft demo may have left you with the impression that Monoliths are good (even though that wasn’t their intention). You may never have heard anyone say (out loud), “Data engineering is software development.“

That gap is worth closing while the estate remains yours to shape.

I can hear some of you thinking, “Why might I want to close that gap, Andy?” That’s a fantastic question. I’m glad you asked! There’s a chance you’ll be migrating eventually - many of you are doing so now - and it’s simpler to migrate from an estate you understand than from one you’re afraid to touch.

We never stopped running it.
We should probably start teaching it again.

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P.S. If you’re managing SSIS catalogs across lifecycle tiers today, SSIS Catalog Compare compares, scripts, and deploys catalog contents between tiers. If you’re orchestrating SSIS at enterprise scale, look at the SSIS Framework. The training and the tooling teach the same patterns, which is not an accident.