Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml)
I have used SQL Server Integration Services since it was released with Microsoft SQL Server 2005. I found it to be a really great tool in a lot of ways, yet found myself moving to more traditional code written in C#, driven by SSIS or some other scheduling technology. The key reasons for this were as follows:
SSIS was slow to open when the projects grew large
It was difficult, or impossible, to merge work from multiple developers on shared packages
Version control provided little more than you would gain creating versions of compiled code. It did not expose to you in a meaningful way what changes were made because the code was embedded in XML.
Automated Unit testing was rather difficult to implement unless you used a lot of custom DLLs in your packages, in which case, you are missing a key benefit of SSIS.
Yesterday I cam across an article by Andy Leonard about writing SSIS code using Biml (Business Intelligence Markup Language) http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Stairway+Series/100585/. According to Andy, Biml stand for
Business Intelligence Markup Language ( a BI specific form of XML). Biml is a wrapper around SSIS, allowing you to work in the Biml development environment using their custom editor.
I wondered at first how this would be any different than the XML defined packages native in SSIS. The difference is that with Biml you actually work in the language, whereas with SSIS, you work in a GUI editor (very inefficient) and never really learn or see the XML format used to save your code. Since you don’t work with the SSIS XML, you really don’t know how to compare versions of it, or modify it directly. I’m sure you could learn it and do so….but you’re on your own there.
Biml has an entire eco-system built around it so that you would be able to learn it and work with it much more readily than SSIS XML.
I haven’t used Biml, or even downloaded the free version of the tool at this point. But, I offer it up to our readers for comment. What do you think about Biml? Have any of you used it, and with what degree of success? Is it really capable of developing code with patterns? How does it work in a unit or integration test environment?
Share your experience on this by leaving your comment below, or sending an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
Featured Script
Stored Procedure Return Variable
To be able to get a Stored Procedures return variable… (read more)