Parent-child variable issues that may impact deployment

We are using SSIS for the first time. My team is working on a project that involves putting a date time stamp into a series of tables. These tables are being assembled in a series of child packages being executed by the parent. When the parent runs, we evaluate our timestamp variable as a GETDATE() expression and pass it to the children to be included as a derived column. We don't want the actual runtime of each step to be the timestamp, just the start of the batch (parent).

In order to get the variable to pass over to the child, we needed to set the package location to "file system"instead of "SQL Server". It seems unusual that this would be so. Are we doing something wrong?

What implications does this have for deployment? Will we need to customize the packages for each instance we plan to run this on? Can you have a parent run a child package on a different instance? This would be a performance plus since we have really huge source databases and would like to distribute the processing.

Hmmm, my boss just told me to scratch the whole idea of parent-child and go with a control table to store the variable for all the packages to access. Oh well, I'm still interested in why this is so cumbersome when really its just passing a parameter from one procedure to another.

Oh, and I think you could use a spellchecker on this message box. At least I could use one.

In the child package, create a variable to hold the parent variable. Same name is fine. Then in the control flow, right click on the background and select "package configurations".

Enable package configurations. Then add a new one. Change the configuration type to "parent package variable." Then, in the specify configuration settings entry, enter the name of the variable in the parent package. Next, on the following screen, select the "value" property of the variable created in your child package. (Expand the child variable until you can select the value property.) Click next. Give the configuration a name and hit finish. Done.

Phil|||

Phil,

Thanks, but we already have that functionality. The problem is that we don't like it. We want something more robust, sort of like passing a parameter from one function to another. And we can't even pass a value parameter with this thingy. This parent-child functionality is just plain ugly. We are using a control table instead, but we don't like doing that either.