How to do it...

1. We'll first create the SSIS Catalog in SSMS. Open SSMS and connect to your local instance:

1. Look for the Integration Services Catalogs folder in object explorer.
2. Right-click on it and select the option Create Catalog....

1. If the Create Catalog... option is not available (disabled - greyed out), it means that a catalog has already been created. Even if the folder is called Integration Services Catalogs - plural, only one Integration Services Catalog can be created by the SQL Server instance. The Create Catalog dialog box appears:

1. SQL Server CLR must be enabled to be able to create a catalog. It's also a good practice to check Enable automatic execution of Integration Services stored procedures at SQL Server startup. This creates a job that cleans up the SSIS Calalog tables. To enable the job, the SQL Server Agent must be enabled and started. To enable the SQL Server Agent, right-click on SQL Server Agent and select Start from the contextual menu that appears.

1. A confirmation screen appears to confirm that we want to start the Agent:

1. Once the Agent has successfully started, we can see in the Jobs folder a job called SSIS Server Maintenance Job:

1. Double-clicking on it, you can see that this job is running every day to clean up the SSIS Catalog based on the retention window:

1. By default, the retention window is set to 365 days. We don't have to change it for the recipes we're going to implement from this book. But you should adjust the retention window setting to ensure that the catalog doesn't get filled with too many execution logs.
2. One of the benefits of this job is to execute clean up log entries in the catalog. As all executions are logged (we'll talk about logging in a later section), the catalog tables can fill up fast.
3. To manage the retention window, in SSMS object explorer right-click on the catalog (SSISDB) and select Properties from the drop-down menu. The following window appears:

1. You can now modify the Retention Period (days) property, as shown in the preceding screenshot. Notice that you also have the ability to stop the clean logs schedule by setting the Clean Logs Periodically to False.