Introduction

I have been on the “What’s New In CTP1 for Denali” speaking “tour” (if you count 2 as a tour) for the past week. What I can say from my interactions, and the feedback from the presentation, there is some real excitement for the new release (although dauntingly far away for some people). In my presentation I go over the “what’s new” for SSIS… and finish up with a look at the new dependency services piece. It is clearly the dependency services that has the BI folks hooked! To support the interest that people have expressed, I wanted to write a quick post to cover some of the dependency services parts, and get you rolling with what will be a very cool, very important part of the BI infrastructure in Denali.

Install

The installation is not complicated, however, is not available from within SSMS. The command line documentation from MSDN is easy to follow, and will get you running with a few simple commands.

Once you have it installed, you need to create extraction points for the things you want to look at. There is a wizard (right-click) that will get you started with the configuration.

In my example, I created a “test” extraction point for SSIS that is pulling from a project that I have already deployed to the server. By right-clicking on that extraction point, you now have two steps to take:

First, you need to select “update catalogs”, then right-click again and select “Sync Now”. Once you have done these two steps, double- click the “default” under views, and you will be able to navigate through the dependencies that you have defined in your extraction points.

Conclusion

I believe you will very quickly feel comfortable navigating the structures, viewing dependencies, and gaining an appreciation for how quick you will be able to do impact analysis with this new tool.