Chapter 16: External Management and WMI Task Implementation

Overview

Chapter 3 gave an explanation of the management operations that can be performed through the SQL Server Management Studio. This chapter will expand on those operations by providing an overview of the ways in which you can externally manage your packages through managed code. Almost all package management operations that you can perform through the SQL Server Management IDE can be accomplished through managed code classes exposed by the Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime namespace. This chapter will investigate the uses of managed classes encapsulated by this namespace such as the Application and Package classes.

The second half of this chapter will detail the capabilities of the WMI Data Reader task and the WMI Event Watcher task. These tasks provide access to system information via the Windows Management Interface model, better known as WMI. Through a query-based language called WQL, similar to SQL in structure and syntax, you can obtain information about a wide variety of system resources. In addition, WMI can be used to monitor a Windows-based system for events that occur in the system and then trigger actions to be performed when the monitored event occurs.

But first you will investigate what package management operations you can implement through managed code.