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I wrote earlier about my naming conventions for SSIS variables that let me quickly figure out the source of the variable value very easily. This post continues on to the prefix-based naming conventions I use (or plan to use) for the 120+ components in SSIS packages.

While looking around online for SSIS component naming conventions, most of the suggestions are based on Jamie Thompson’s (Blog | @JamieT) post SSIS: Suggested Best Practices and naming conventions. He has tried to limit the prefixes to 3 or 4 characters and included most of the frequently used components. Using the prefixes as described in his post has helped me a lot in the maintenance phase of a package when my memory has faded about the functionality and the workflow. Some more motivation to adopt a naming convention can be found in 31-days of SSIS series by Jason Strate (Blog | @StrateSQL).

My goal was to make an exhaustive list of components with their prefixes so that –

• I do not need to put on my thinking hat every time I start using a component for the first time.
• The naming convention can be future-proof and avoid confusion with new components being introduced in SSIS platform.
• Remove the guesswork (especially for new developers and maintenance teams who may not be SSIS developers primarily) by avoiding prefixes that sound too similar to another.

I created an Excel sheet of all the components (more than 120) that I found listed in MSDN, i.e. containers, connection managers, sources, destinations, tasks, and transformations. My prefixes are more elaborate than Jamie’s for the reasons mentioned above, but that is just my preference. You can use the Excel as a template for you organization and modify the prefixes to you liking.

The following is an example of one section from the Excel.

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Example –