title: SSIS converts Varchar2 to DT_STR
body: <p>We have an SSIS package downloading data from an Oracle database to an SQL Server datawarehouse. For this datawarehouse, several environments are set up; Development, Test and Production. Dev and test share a machine, Prod is stand-alone.</p>
  
  <p>When the SSIS package is run on the PROD machine, it downloads the Varchar2 columns from our Oracle source database to MSSQL in DT_WSTR format and saves this to a NVarchar column. I.E. all steps involved support Unicode.</p>
  
  <p>When this same package is run against the same source database on the DEV/Test box, it somehow sees the external columns as being Varchar, derives this to DT_STR in the data flow and refuses to store this in an NVarchar column.</p>
  
  <p>All OS's are Win2K8r2, MSSQL 2008 64 bits. The package is run in 32bits mode, same behaviour is seen when run from BIDS or from SQL Agent.</p>
  
  <p>Anyone care to guess why? I've already seen the suggestion to disable validating external metadata (<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/18383598/2903056">https://stackoverflow.com/a/18383598/2903056</a>), but that's not a practical suggestion for our situation.</p>