Is there any releavance for "ROW PER BATCH" AND "MAX INSERT COMMIT SIZE" IN SSIS PACKAGES?

These parameters refer to DFT OLE DB Destination with Fast Load mode only. OLE DB Destination in Fast Load issues an insert bulk command. These two parameters control it in the following way:

  • Maximum insert commit size - controls how much data inserted in a single batch. So, if you have MICS set to 5000 and you have 9000 rows and you encounter an error in the first 5000 results, the entire batch of 5000 will be rolled back. MISC equates to the BATCHSIZE argument in the BULK INSERT transact-sql command.
  • Rows Per Batch - merely a hint to the query optimizer. The value of this should be set to the actual expected number of rows. RPB equates to the ROWS_PER_BATCH argument to the BULK INSERT transact-sql command.
    Specifying a value for the MICS will have a few effects. Each batch is copied to the transaction log, which will cause it to grow quickly, but offers the ability to back up that transaction log after each batch. Also, having a large batch will negatively affect memory if you have indexes on the target table, and if you are not using table locking, you might have more blocking going on.

BULK INSERT (Transact-SQL) - MS Article on this command.

DefaultBuffermaxsize and DefaultBuffermaxrows controls RAM buffer management inside DFT itself, and has no interference with options mentioned above.


Rows per batch - The default value for this setting is -1 which specifies all incoming rows will be treated as a single batch. You can change this default behavior and break all incoming rows into multiple batches. The allowed value is only positive integer which specifies the maximum number of rows in a batch.

Maximum insert commit size - The default value for this setting is '2147483647' (largest value for 4 byte integer type) which specifies all incoming rows will be committed once on successful completion. You can specify a positive value for this setting to indicate that commit will be done for those number of records. You might be wondering, changing the default value for this setting will put overhead on the dataflow engine to commit several times. Yes that is true, but at the same time it will release the pressure on the transaction log and tempdb to grow tremendously specifically during high volume data transfers.

The above two settings are very important to understand to improve the performance of tempdb and the transaction log. For example if you leave 'Max insert commit size' to its default, the transaction log and tempdb will keep on growing during the extraction process and if you are transferring a high volume of data the tempdb will soon run out of memory as a result of this your extraction will fail. So it is recommended to set these values to an optimum value based on your environment.

Note: The above recommendations have been done on the basis of experience gained working with DTS and SSIS for the last couple of years. But as noted before there are other factors which impact the performance, one of the them is infrastructure and network. So you should do thorough testing before putting these changes into your production environment.