Finding development tools for SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise SSAS and SSIS - BIDS

0
votes

I'm helping a customer setting up a simple development environment for SSIS and SSAS on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition.

They have one developer (slash server) computer, let's call it A, with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and BIDS installed.

They need BIDS installed on a second development computer, let's call it B.

B has already installed Visual Studio (I think it is) 2012 with SQL Server Data Tools.

When we try to open a SSIS package on B, Visual Studio will only move forward if we "upgrade" the package - we cannot do that since the package also need to work on A.

One solution could be to install SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition with BIDS on B.

My questions are:

  1. Where can we find and buy a license SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition with BIDS?

  2. Do I have any other solutions?

  3. If we install Visual Studio 2012 with SQL Server Data Tools on A, will the new type of SSIS and SSAS package be able to run on SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise?

1
ssissql-server-2008-r2ssassql-server-data-toolsbids

1 Answers

1
votes

Purchasing questions would be off topic but you should be able to contact your local Microsoft licensed authorized reseller (LAR) and a developer license will run you approximately 50 USD

You can also look at an MSDN license which allows you a cornocopia of software choices, of which SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer edition would be one, but the cost will be at least ten times higher than an individual license.

Installing VS 2012 on the new machine will be a bad choice unless you plan on upgrading that installation to SQL Server 2012. The BI artifacts you author in Visual Studio are directly tied to the edition of SQL Server installed until 2016 gave us backwards compatibility for SSIS packages.

  • VS 2005 -> SQL Server 2005
  • 2008 -> 2008 or 2008 R2
  • 2010 or 2012 -> 2012
  • 2013 -> 2014
  • 2015 -> 2012/2014/2016

So, if you make new things using SSDT (VS 2010 or VS 2012) you are building things that will run on SQL Server 2012 or higher.

A different way of doing things would to use Biml. Using the same biml declaration, I can emit a 2005 package or a 2016 package. The syntax for a package is the same across the versions and the tool that "makes" the SSIS has the intelligence to create the correct XML for the platform.

The free version of the tool, BIDS Helper or Biml Express are add-ins to Visual Studio that correlate with your version of BIDS/SSDT. On my machine, I have each version of the design studio installed so it's a matter of opening the correct IDE and away I go.

The paid for products: BimlStudio and BimlOnline provide for version dependent targeting without requiring the corresponding installation. As of this writing, BimlOnline is still in beta so it's free to use (but doesn't support SSAS). In fact, SSAS can only be emitted from Mist/BimlStudio