Should the first step of an SSIS solution be to check connections?

Question

In SSIS 2012, how would I check whether a connection and credentials are working?

In a scenario where you must pull and aggregate data from different sources and load it into some target databases, should the whole project be preceeded by a special package that checks whether the connections are up and running?

If so, how would I check whether the connections to which the package needs access are up and ready to be connected to and that the credentials are right?

I understand that if I omit the step of checking the connections, the whole thing will just error out, but I feel like the best practice would be to explicitly check whether the connections and credentials are working.

Thank you very much for your kind attention.

Answer 1

Apparently your check would be as Siyual suggested a select 1.. But the bigger question here is do all the connections need to be active for you to get the target data or would you have some data to load even if some connections faulted - which obviously would depend on the nature of your requirement. Here is where the concept of staging tables, concept of Delta and using the completion workflow instead of the success work flow would help. For example and simplicity sake lets say I am working on pulling sales data from 3 different point of sale locations for my company (Brazil, US and India), I store the dates I last pulled from in a table and update them when the extraction is successful. In this case if one extraction fails I would still want to go to the next location and to try to pull the data.