SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) - Data Viewers (Histogram) in SSIS

Introduction:
In this article we are going to see how to use the Data viewers (Histogram) in SSIS packaging. Data viewers are used as one of the debugging options for the developers to check the data between the processes of a packaging. Data viewers are good in places where we have a minimum of data to analyze and then executing the package at the development stage to see the change took place in the prior task and proceed to the next task. Let's jump start to see this sample how to set the properties of the control.
You can look into my series of article on SSIS at the url - http://f5debug.net/all-articles/
Steps:
Follow steps 1 to 3 on my first article to open the BIDS project and select the right project to work on an integration services project. Once the project is created, we will see how to use the data viewers to see the data flow. Now once the project is opened drag and drop a source and a destination task along with a dataflow to do some manipulation as shown below:


Now we will do the small task of copying the data from the source table to a destination file using the OLEDB source and Flatfile destination as shown above.
Now let's configure both the tasks to make a flow as shown below.
Source Configuration:


Destination Configuration:


Now your screen looks like below after the configuration is completed:


Now when we execute the package it will do the execution but we are not sure at what point what happens. So in order to see the transformation between the source and the destination we can use a data viewer browser.
Data viewer provides different options to view the data, the types are: Grid, Histogram, Scatter Plot, and Chart Format.  In this sample we will see how to use the Histogram option to view. To start the data viewer Right click on the green arrow which connects the source and destination and select the data viewer. It will open the window as shown below:


Now click on the Add button to do the configuration of our required data viewer. It will open the window as shown below:


Now we will select the Histogram since we are going to see how to use the Histogram. We have a tab Histogram; just navigate to that tab and select the column as shown below:


Now we are done with the configuration and ready to execute the package. We can see a viewer icon next to the arrow as shown below which indicates that the viewer is active to view.


Now we will execute the package and see the data viewer browser. Press F5 to execute the package and we can see the data viewer browser as shown in the screen below:


We have an arrow button in the browser; once we are done with our analysis we can click on the button to proceed. Once we click that button the execution starts and proceeds further and the final screen will appear as below:

Conclusion:

So in this article we have seen how to use the data viewer (Histogram) to analyze the data and to proceed further which acts like a debugging portion for SSIS packaging.