Exam Essentials

Understand how to design security for accessing packages.   You should have a good understanding of how the various security options for packages affect the ability of other users to change and run packages you create. Relying on SQL Server for storage and security offers a nice alternative to the package-level security options.

Understand how to deploy, move, and schedule packages.   Packages are deployed using DTExec.exe or DTExecUI.exe after you have created a manifest file (which is an XML document). Remember that the manifest is not created by default; you have to enable the CreateDeploymentUtility property of the package. You can move packages using the Export Wizard or using DTUtil.exe at the command line. Packages can be scheduled for execution using either SQL Agent or the Windows Task Scheduler.

Understand the advantages of using checkpoints.   Checkpoints allow you to easily set restart points in your package so that if something fails, the entire package doesn’t have to be reexecuted. Checkpoints require no code to implement.

Know how to troubleshoot packages.   Data viewers allow you to easily inspect data at various points in the package without having to write the intermediate results to a table or text file. You can use breakpoints to stop execution when a certain condition or point in code is reached. And although not a true troubleshooting feature, know that you should be using source control so that you can roll back to an earlier version if you cannot identify the cause of a problem.