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Troubleshooting Package Connectivity

Integration Services includes features and tools that you can use to troubleshoot connectivity between packages and the data sources from which packages extract and load data.

Troubleshooting Issues with External Data Providers

Many packages fail during interactions with external data providers. However, the messages that those providers return to Integration Services frequently do not provide enough information to start troubleshooting the interaction. To address this troubleshooting need, Integration Services includes logging messages that you can use to troubleshoot a package's interaction with external data sources.

  • Enable logging and select the package's Diagnostic event to see the troubleshooting messages. The following Integration Services components are capable of writing a message to the log before and after every call to an external data provider:

    • OLE DB connection manager, OLE DB source, and OLE DB destination

    • ADO.NET connection manager and ADO NET source

    • Execute SQL task

    • Lookup transformation, OLE DB Command transformation, and Slowly Changing Dimension transformation

    The log messages include the name of the method being called. For example, these log messages might include the Open method of an OLE DB Connection object or the ExecuteNonQuery method of a Command object. The messages have the following format, where '%1!s!' is a placeholder for the method information:

    ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: '%1!s!'.
ExternalRequest_post: '%1!s!'. The external request has completed.

    To troubleshoot the interaction with the external data provider, review the log to see whether every "before" message (ExternalRequest_pre) has a corresponding "after" message (ExternalRequest_post). If there is no corresponding "after" message, you know that the external data provider did not respond as expected.

    The following example shows some sample rows from a log that contains these logging messages:

    ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'ITransactionJoin::JoinTransaction'.
ExternalRequest_post: 'ITransactionJoin::JoinTransaction succeeded'. The external request has completed.
ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDbConnection.Open'.
ExternalRequest_post: 'IDbConnection.Open succeeded'. The external request has completed.
ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDbConnection.CreateCommand'.
ExternalRequest_post: 'IDbConnection.CreateCommand finished'. The external request has completed."
ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDbCommand.ExecuteReader'.
ExternalRequest_post: 'IDbCommand.ExecuteReader finished'. The external request has completed."
ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDataReader.GetSchemaTable'.
ExternalRequest_post: 'IDataReader.GetSchemaTable finished'. The external request has completed."
ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDataReader.Close'.
ExternalRequest_post: 'IDataReader.Close finished'. The external request has completed."
ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDbConnection.Close'.
ExternalRequest_post: 'IDbConnection.Close finished'. The external request has completed."
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