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Record Versions in ETL staging areas

Ever wanted to be able to use the OLEDB Destination component in SSIS to load staging tables and have the underlying data versioned for you? If so, here's a solution which is working very well herein a production environment.


Below are some scripts which implement automatic triggers on staging tables so that whenever a newly loaded record collides with the primary key of an existing record, the existing record is quietly moved out into an archive table. In practice, you create two schemas -
  • Staging   - contains all staging tables
  • Archive   - contains all archive (historic) tables
When two tables with the same name are detected in these schemas, then triggers are placed onto the table in the Staging schema to handle moving old data into the archive record. The caveat here is that data is only preserved for columns where the column name and type is identical in both the staging and archive table.

There are two scripts that make all of this work:
  1. A stored procedure, responsible for generating triggers for a staging table.
    It generates two triggers:
    a) an INSTEAD OF trigger, which detects any key collisions and deletes the offending record/s, and
    b) an AFTER DELETE trigger, which moves deleted staging data into an identically named archive table.

    If you are comfortable with T-SQL, then you should consider modifying this script to meet your particular needs.
  2. A DDL trigger, which reacts to the creation or alteration of staging & archive tables by executing the aforementioned stored procedure. Effectively this established a "self healing" mechanism, where triggers are automatically recalculated in response to any changes to staging or archive tables.
Example - create two simple sales tables:

Example - simulate two data loads, where the source record has changed:

The above example, will result in one record being in the Staging table, and the older (first) record being moved into the Archive table. Notice how the Archive table introduces the column RecordRetired and uses it as part of the primary key. This allows multiple records with the same SaleID to exist in the archive.

The Nitty Gritty
OK - so by now you've got the point of what the scripts below do for you. Be sure to read the very bottom of this post for information on how to make use this solution in conjunction with SSIS.

Part 1: The Trigger Generating Stored Procedure

Part 2: The DDL Trigger to react to table changes



Using SSIS Data Flows
The really good news is that you can still use SSIS OLEDB Destination's FAST_LOAD mode when loading in data from source systems, which results in good performance.
Just always follow these two rules which using the OLEDB Destination component:


  1. Include FIRE_TRIGGERS in the FastLoadOptions property
  2. Keep the FastLoadMaxInsertCommitSize to something below 100,000


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