Hitachi Consulting BI Blog

DTS Loops

Anybody who has ever written--or tried to write--a loop in DTS 2000 would prefer to do the beer-with-Drano-chaser routine. The whole process is an incredible spaghetti hack of lying to steps about whether they've already been executed.

Not surprising that Yukon DTS has an easy-to-use Loop task. Very surprising not to have to use it. To demonstrate the Loop task, I built a package that loops through a bunch of text files in a folder, unioning the results into a table--simple, but real-world, blah, blah. I was a bit annoyed to have to deal with the results of each file in a separate iteration, but not bad.

Then, in a completely unrelated package, I happened to create a data source--a “connection manager” in Yukon-speak--against text files, and I happened to use a wild-card string for the file name. And the data flow happened to automatically grab the data from all the matching files. No Loop task. No separate iterations. Totally unnerving. Totally cool. Totally wipes out my Loop task example package.