If you designed a Project in Visual Studio 2015/Data tools 2015 but need to deploy to a SQL 2012/2014 environment then there will be a pre upgrade step you need to perform.
Often if you are trying to deploy to a SQL instance with a project built in a miss-matched version, you will get error messages that will contain many repetitions of The contact information for this task is ""
Downgrading is not supported in any project built before 2015, you will need to upgrade it to 2015 first, and it can only be downgraded to 2012 or 2014, you can not downgrade to 2005 or 2008.
If your target Server Version is set to SQL Server Vnext, then you should change it to be in line with whichever server you are deploying it to. This can cause projects built in VS 2015 that are being deployed to 2016 to fail if they are set to SQL Server Vnext, which can also cause the SSIS tasks to not show up in the SSIS Toolbox.
1) Ensure matchIT SQL is also installed on the server you're trying to deploy to, and it has the same install path as your dev/QA environment, the matchIT SQL installer puts required dll's on the server that are required for the package to run.
2) before deploying to the Server, you will need to change to the appropriate TargetServerVersion, you can change this by going to debug --> then choosing the project's properties
Then under Configuration Properties you can change it to the appropriate server version
save the project
You should now be able to deploy to the server, but if the project still fails after deploying then you will need to follow below step and then redeploy.
3) depending on whether you have multiple instances on the target server, there will be an additional change you may need to make to make sure the right dll's are used.
If you navigate to the package's directory then open the package in a notepad editor you'll need to replace Version=14.0.0.0 with Version=13.0.0.0 if downgrading to 2016, with Version=12.0.0.0 if downgrading to 2014, or Version=11.0.0.0 if downgrading to 2012
*make sure to do a replace all, as it will repeat for each matchIT SQL task you have
Please note:
Once you've made that change, you may not be able to edit the package further unless you change the version back to 13.0.0.0 before opening it up to edit again.
We do suggest building any SSIS packages in the Visual Studio Version that corresponds to the SQL Version it will be deployed to in order for simplifying any process you set up
Here’s a list of SQL Server versions, with their corresponding Visual Studio versions:
SQL Server |
Visual Studio |
2005 |
2005 |
2008 |
2008 |
2012 |
2010 |
2014 |
2012 or 2013 |
2016 |
2015 |
2017 |
2017 |
So if somebody’s created a package with Visual Studio 2015, then they’re using the SQL Server 2016 SSIS components.
If they have SQL Server 2012 installed, then they’d create an SSIS package using Visual Studio 2010.
If you need to upgrade a package, then see this article