Is a licensed version of Visual Studio required for SSIS solution?

Question

Is it possible to open a SSIS solution using Microsoft's free tools (Visual Studio Team Explorer and SQL Server Data Tools) or does it require a full installation of Visual Studio?

I am trying to do so with just the free tools and am getting an error saying that "this versino of Visual Studio is unable to open the following projects" then another one saying the solution I have opened is under source control but not currently configured for integrated source control in visual studio.

We have other users who use the full version of Visual Studio 2017 and it works fine so I am wondering if this is just a limitation of the free products offered by Microsoft.

Answer 1

To edit SQL Server 2005 SSIS packages, you need Visual Studio 2005 and installation of Business Intelligence Designer Studio, BIDS. This required a license, developer edition was sufficient, to access the tooling.

SQL Server 2008 & SQL Server 2008 R2 would install into Visual Studio 2008. This too required a SQL Server license as the media only existed on the server media.

SQL Server 2012 would install into both Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012. This was delivered in both physical media installations and downloadable tooling which was rebranded to SQL Server Data Tools- BI Edition, now just SQL Server Data Tools and the components were just licensed via click through agreement.

SQL Server 2014 installs into Visual Studio 2013 and was now only available through the download of SSDT.

SQL Server 2016 added a new twist into the mix. It installed into Visual Studio 2015 but it could now create/edit/target SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 packages. This was huge as until this point, as a consultant I would have required 5 different versions of the "same" program on my machine. Now I'd only need 3.

SQL Server 2017 installs SSDT in both Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017.

I assume SQL Server 2019 will similarly target VS 2017 and VS 109.

Across all of these versions, if you didn't have Visual Studio installed, the installer would install the Visual Studio shell on your machine so that the project templates would work.

Last I knew, neither Visual Studio Community Edition nor VS Code will work with the SSDT templates so be sure and open the correct product to work with SSIS projects (.dtproj)

The warning/error about "under source control but not currently configured" smells like something is awry with how you have the TFS hook installed but I can't comment on that.

Download and install SSDT 2017 for Visual Studio

You can verify the status of your SSDT installation for Visual Studio by going to the Help, About Microsoft Visual Studio menu and looking for "SQL Server Integration Services." With ... 2017? you can now do a piecemeal install and only pick SQL Server Data Tools (database projects) or SSAS/SSIS/SSRS. Previously, the SSDT-BI install was trio of SS_S and SSDT (no BI) was the database projects.

Previous answer on where SSDT-BI is

Answer 2

You have at lease two options:

• Use Visual Studio Community Edition together with SSDT. Still, you have to check its License terms with your Legal department - it might be not legal to use Community Edition in Enterprise.
• Use Visual Studio Isolated Shell together with SSDT. More instructions on how to install it. As far as I know, it is legal to use it for debugging.

The VS Isolated Shell is usually installed with SQL Server 2014/16.