The last significant new feature of SSIS that we will look at is the data tap. A data tap literally "taps into" the data flow between SSIS tasks and writes it out to a .csv
file.
This is very useful, especially in a production environment, as it allows a dump of the data passing between two SSIS tasks to be captured for analysis by a production, test, or development team if there is a production problem, without changing the SSIS package in the live environment.
This means the production DBA doesn't need to change the package (always a bad idea) and the developer doesn't have to be given access to the production machine in order to get the data they need to debug the process. Everyone wins, including the end users, as the system remains in the same stable state.
A data tap is transient, so each time you execute a package, you need to recreate the data tap, which just involves a call to three T-SQL stored procedures.
As this functionality is most likely to be used in a production environment...