Having trouble with Merge Join with SSIS

Question

I am currently using Merge Join to perform an inner join on two sorted sets of data in SSIS. The problem I am having is that no records are being returned from the inner join. To troubleshoot I have performed the following:

1. I exported both sorted data sets into my local SQL Server, and wrote an inner join manually. This confirmed that I should be receiving 720 rows as a result of the inner join between the two data sets.

2. I used a lookup, instead of a merge join, to perform the inner join and this actually worked. The reason I do not want to use a lookup is because of the performance I am getting with these sets of data. To give you an idea of the data I'm working with, table A has ~16k rows and table B has ~7.8 million rows. Using the lookup component yielded a run time of over an hour.

So I was wondering if you guys could help me get the Merge Join setup correctly. To help you help me, I've provided screenshots of how I currently have things configured:

Data Flow of Job

Table A Sort

Table B Sort

Merge Join

Answer 1

Normally, I'd say check your data types and or casing but if the lookup works, then that doesn't seem as probable. Safe to assume the lookup would be against the 7.8M row table b? Check your metadata anyway for the 4 keys on both inputs, maybe there's a length discrepancy