You may already know that I usually use the series A fish out of water when I want to write something that goes a little bit off-topic on my main blog topic: Enterprise Integration. This time, and despite this, can also be considered an Enterprise Integration – ETL process – I don’t consider myself a SQL Server “expert”. I often delegate these tasks to my data team. However, this week one of my clients call me regarding an issue we were facing with our integration platform, which is mainly composed of SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and Azure.
While diagnosing the problem – almost feeling like Dr. House – I realize we were not getting any new data because the ETL jobs failed with the error: There is already an active instance of this package.
That happened because we were controlling the execution of the package and not allowing multiple executions of the same package to coincide by doing the following validation.
IF (SELECT COUNT(*) AS ExecutionCount
FROM SSISDB.catalog.executions
WHERE status = 2
AND folder_name = ''
AND package_name = '.dtsx') > 0
BEGIN
THROW 50000, 'There is already an active instance of this package.', 1;
END
The problem was that I didn’t knew at that time how to monitor which SSIS packages were currently running and how to stop them. Because for some reason, I’m guessing network issues, those packages were kind of zombies. And I didn’t have my team available at that time. Because that was a production environment, I had to learn, which is also good! And this may be a helpful tip for other situations where we need to check what are the SSIS Packages running from the Catalog and want to subsequently stop them.
To accomplish that, we need to:
On current versions of Windows, on the Start page, type SSMS and then select Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.
When using older versions of Windows, on the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft SQL Server, and then select SQL Server Management Studio.
On the Object Explorer panel, expand Integration Services Catalogs, right-click on SSISDB, and select the Active Operations option from the options menu.
A new Active Operations window will open, presenting all the running packages
From this window, you can select the package you want and click the Stop button to force stopping that SSIS package execution.
It’s also possible to do the same process via T-SQL by running these to queries:
Query to retrieve all currently running packages in the SSIS.Catalog
SELECT * FROM SSISDB.catalog.executions WHERE end_time IS NULL
Query to stop the execution of a specific SSIS package
Hope you find this helpful! So, if you liked the content or found it helpful and want to help me write more content, you can buy (or help buy) my son a Star Wars Lego!
Author: Sandro Pereira
Sandro Pereira lives in Portugal and works as a consultant at DevScope. In the past years, he has been working on implementing Integration scenarios both on-premises and cloud for various clients, each with different scenarios from a technical point of view, size, and criticality, using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft BizTalk Server and different technologies like AS2, EDI, RosettaNet, SAP, TIBCO etc.
He is a regular blogger, international speaker, and technical reviewer of several BizTalk books all focused on Integration. He is also the author of the book “BizTalk Mapping Patterns & Best Practices”. He has been awarded MVP since 2011 for his contributions to the integration community.
View all posts by Sandro Pereira
I’m back to writing! With so many talks in recent times and those who still come, and with it all the time necessary to prepare them; with so much work and new projects ongoing (thankfully); with 3 kids at home and recently married… it has been difficult to arrange a free time to concentrate on the writing. But I’m back, and for starting with a smooth topic that I like: “Errors and Warnings, Causes and Solutions” on a problem that actually I faced today while trying to connect with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS): “The specified service does not exist as an installed service.”
Today, while I was trying to access SSIS from SQL Server 2016 Server, that host and support BizTalk Server 2016 I got the following and bizarre error:
TITLE: Connect to Server
——————————
Cannot connect to ..
——————————
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Failed to retrieve data for this request. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk.Sfc)
For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft%20SQL%20Server&LinkId=20476
——————————
Connecting to the Integration Services service on the computer “localhost” failed with the following error: “The specified service does not exist as an installed service.”.
This error can occur when you try to connect to a SQL Server 2005 Integration Services service from the current version of the SQL Server tools. Instead, add folders to the service configuration file to let the local Integration Services service manage packages on the SQL Server 2005 instance.
Cause
This was bizarre because again I was trying to access to SSIS directly from SQL Server machine and I was sure that I had Integration Services installed and running on the server as I was able to confirm access to the services (services.msc).
I’m not a SQL Server specialist, but after careful research into the SSIS documentation it says:
“To connect directly to an instance of the legacy Integration Services Service, you have to use the version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) aligned with the version of SQL Server on which the Integration Services Service is running. For example, to connect to the legacy Integration Services Service running on an instance of SQL Server 2016, you have to use the version of SSMS released for SQL Server 2016.”
That triggered some red lights on my head because:
I knew that this was a recent installation and we were using a current version of SQL Server Management Studio (v17.9.1);
and I also knew that for example during the BizTalk Server configuration we may face some issues configuring some features if we are using a recent version of SSMS, you should use a compatible and recommended version: SSMS 16.5.3.
Install SSMS 16.5.3 in another machine to access SSIS.
Or accessing from BizTalk Server 2016 machine that should have this SSMS version installed.
In my case, I was able to connect to SSIS without any problem from SSMS installed in BizTalk Server 2018 machine because I always installed from day one SSMS 16.5.3 on BizTalk Servers machines.
