WINDOWS MANAGEMENT INSTRUMENTATION TASKS

SSIS includes two special tasks that enable you to query system information and monitor system events: the WMI Data Reader Task and the WMI Event Watcher Task. These tasks are especially useful for system management, as you will discover with examples later in this chapter. WMI uses a specialized query language known as WQL, which is similar to SQL, to obtain information about a Windows system. WMI has many features and capabilities, so we won’t be able to cover all of them, but here are a few common uses:

• You can get information about files and directories, such as file size, or enumerate the files in a folder. You can also monitor the file system for events, such as whether a file has been modified recently. This could be required in a package if your package is importing data from a CSV or XML file. A change in the file could trigger tasks to fire in your package.