The term is widely used and covers so many things simultaneously, so it is hard to figure out what it means exactly. Do managed services include database administration only or do they also cover installation, upgrades and migration to other servers? Are database managed services always 24/7 or are there any other options? Do DBMS involve routine maintenance procedures or can they also handle critical issues? There are literally dozens of questions! Reporting? Custom service? Performance tuning and bottle-neck analysis? Too bad, each database managed service provider answers these questions differently, in its own way.

One of widespread problems in SSIS packages is to replace NULL values with some specific value. Unfortunately, before it was not a simple task as Integration Services didn’t have the operator similar to ISNULL () in T-SQL. To be more exact, there was such an operator, but it works in a slightly different way.