Deleting a Package from the SSIS Catalog

Among the new features of SSIS 2016, one of my favorite is incremental package deployment. This new functionality allows the deployment of a single package to an SSIS catalog without having to deploy the entire project. Since the release of this version, I’ve been asked the following question a few times: “How does one go about deleting a package from the SSIS catalog in SSIS 2016?”

The short answer is this: You still can’t delete a single package from the SSIS catalog. Even though the latest version allows the deployment of a package at a time, removing a deployed package must still be done at the project level.

Deleting a Package from the SSIS Catalog

There are two methods for deleting a package from the SSIS catalog:

• Use SSDT to remove the package from the SSIS project in the source code, and then redeploy the entire project
• Delete the entire project from the SSIS catalog, and redeploy only the desired packages individually (not recommended)

Although the latter option above will work, if you have any project-level connections or parameters, those will not be deployed through this method. Stick with the first option above if you need to delete a package, as it ensures that any project-level assets will be deployed along with the packages. The first option also preserves the version history of that project, in case you decide later that you shouldn’t have removed that package after all.

Conclusion

Even though you can deploy packages individually to the SSIS catalog in SSIS 2016, there is no built-in functionality to delete a single package. However, removing the package from the source code and redeploying is a relatively easy workaround.