How This Book Is Structured

The first four chapters of this book are structured more as instructional, laying the groundwork for the later chapters. From Chapter 5 on, we show you how to perform a task as we explain the feature. SSIS is a very feature-rich product, and it took a lot to cover the product:

• Chapter 1 introduces the concepts that we're going to discuss throughout the remainder of this book. We talk about the SSIS architecture and give a brief overview of what you can do with SSIS.

• Chapter 2 shows you how to quickly learn how to import and export data by using the Import and Export Wizard and then takes you on a tour of the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS).

• Chapter 3 goes into each of the tasks that are available to you in SSIS.

• Chapter 4 covers how to use containers to do looping in SSIS and describes how to configure each of the basic transforms.

  Now that you know how to configure most of the tasks and transforms, Chapter 5 puts it all together with a large example that lets you try out your SSIS experience.

• Chapter 6 is where we cover each of the more advanced tasks and transforms that were too complex to talk about in much depth in the previous three chapters.

• Chapter 7 shows you some of the ways you can use the Script task in SSIS. This chapter also speaks to expressions.

  Sometimes you connect to systems other than SQL Server. Chapter 8 shows you how to connect to systems other than SQL Server like Excel, XML, and Web Services.

• Chapter 9 demonstrates how to scale SSIS and make it more reliable. You can use the features in this chapter to show you how to make the package restartable if a problem occurs.

• Chapter 10 teaches the Data Flow buffer architecture and how to monitor the Data Flow execution.

• Chapter 11 shows how to performance tune the Data Flow and some of the best practices.

• Chapter 12 shows how to migrate DTS 2000 packages to SSIS and if necessary how to run DTS 2000 packages under SSIS. It also discusses metadata management.

• Chapter 13 discusses how to handle problems with SSIS with error and event handling.

• Chapter 14 shows the SSIS object model and how to use it to extend SSIS. The chapter goes through creating your own components, and then Chapter 15 adds a user interface to the discussion.

• Chapter 16 walks through creating an application that interfaces with the SSIS to manage the environment. It also discusses the WMI set of tasks.

• Chapter 17 teaches you how to expose the SSIS Data Flow to other programs like InfoPath, Reporting Services, and your own .NET application.

• Chapter 18 introduces a software development life cycle methodology to you. It speaks to how SSIS can integrate with Visual Studio Team Systems.

• Chapter 19 is a programmatic case study that creates three SSIS packages for a banking application.