Moving Packages

Moving packages is really just deploying a package to a different location. You can handle moving packages in a few ways, and we’ll review each of them briefly in this section.

If you right-click any package, you will see menu choices for importing or exporting a package. The package location can be SQL Server, the file system, or the SSIS package store (which is just the special folder in the file system that SSMS scans for packages). Select the new package path (which can even be in the same folder on the same server as long as you give the package a new name), and click OK. There’s not much to it!

Alternatively, you can move (and many other operations) from the command line using DTUtil.exe. The syntax isn’t the easiest, but Books Online has a number of examples from which to choose.

For example, to make a copy of your package (which will be Package1) on the same server, you could do this:

 dtutil /COPY SQL;Package1 /SQL Package

Or you can do a true move, which in this example will copy Package1 to the server called Train1 and then delete it from the server called EarlGrey:

 dtutil /MOVE SQL;Package1 /SQL Package1 /SourceS EARLGREY /DestS Train1

Why Would You Move Packages?

The most common reason to move packages is to take them from a development server to a quality assurance server and from there to a production server. It’s also possible that you would move packages to balance the load, moving a few packages from a heavily used server to a less used server.