What s New? (or, This Is Not Your Father s DTS)

What's New? (or, This Is Not Your Father's DTS!)

A popular answer to this question is "Everything." Integration Services is the successor to Data Transformation Services (DTS), so there are some similarities, but because it is a complete rewrite, there is very little code from DTS remaining in Integration Services. In some ways, it is easier to list what is the same than to list everything that's different.

If you are familiar with DTS, you'll quickly grasp the control flow concepts. In DTS, the control flow and data flow were all on the same design surface. Integration Services provides a separate design surface for control flow and data flow. The separation makes it easier to understand and organize complex packages. Big gains were made in the data flow functionality. Where DTS has the Datapump, Integration Services has the Data Flow Task or Pipeline. The Datapump supported only one source, transform, and destination. DTS transformations are limited in scope, number, and performance. Integration Services Data Flow Tasks can perform extremely complex and advanced data processing within one pipeline.

Integration Services still has tasks, but they have been cloistered to some extent because the package pointer is no longer passed to them and through various mechanisms, the Integration Services runtime ensures that tasks do not access their own package during execution.

The DTS concept of a Step has been expanded to what is now called a Taskhost. The Step participated in the task execution scheduling. The Taskhost schedules the task execution and much, much more.

Integration Services still has the concept of precedence constraints. However, they have been made smarter by adding expressions to the precedence equation and multiple precedence constraints can be OR'ed so that if any one of multiple precedence constraints pointing to the same task is satisfied, the task can execute.

Connections still exist in Integration Services, but they are now called connection managers. In DTS, given certain conditions, a connection would serialize workflow. Connection managers generate a new connection every time you call AcquireConnection, so there is no connection conflict. Every task gets its own physical connection.

Logging still exists but has been expanded and updated. Variables are more important and flexible than their DTS counterparts and the designer is much more comprehensive and powerful. Debugging support is now available in the form of breakpoints, watches, and call stacks. Eventing has been enhanced to make it possible to handle them inside the package with event handlers.

As you can see, Integration Services carried forward, improved, and augmented many of the concepts found in DTS while adding a few new tasks and many more transformations.