Use Annotations in Packages

The SSIS Designer provides annotations, which you can use to make packages self-documenting and easier to understand and maintain. You can add annotations to the control flow, data flow, and event handler design surfaces of SSIS Designer. The annotations can contain any type of text, and they are useful for adding labels, comments, and other descriptive information to a package. Annotations are a design-time feature only. For example, they are not written to logs.

When you press ENTER, the text wraps to the next line. The annotation box automatically increases in size as you add additional lines of text. Package annotations are persisted as clear text in the CDATA section of the package file.

For more information about changes to the format of the package file, see Package Format.

When you save the package, SSIS Designer saves the annotations in the package.

To add an annotation to a package

Integration Services icon (small) Stay Up to Date with Integration Services

For the latest downloads, articles, samples, and videos from Microsoft, as well as selected solutions from the community, visit the Integration Services page on MSDN:


For automatic notification of these updates, subscribe to the RSS feeds available on the page.