Summary

Now you are familiar with the SQL Server 2005 Integration Services concepts and the tools that you use to create, configure, and deploy the packages that are part of an Integration Services solution.

First, this chapter covered Business Intelligence Development Studio, the IDE, in which you create Integration Services projects to manage your Integration Services solutions. You learned about the tools that Business Intelligence Studio provides for building packages, the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard that provides a great way to build simple data transfer packages and to get a head start on complex packages, and SSIS Designer to create enterprise-level packages from the ground up. We delved into SSIS Designer and discussed the design surfaces within SSIS Designer and the package functionality that you build on each surface. Integration Services provides tools for implementing more advanced features in packages, and we covered the tools that are available from SSIS Designer to implement logging, configurations, and variables. Next you explored the tools to create a deployment bundle (a deployment utility, packages, and package dependencies) to use to deploy packages to a test or production environment. After packages are deployed, they can be run and managed in SQL Server Management Studio, and you saw the tools that this environment provides to perform tasks such as importing and exporting packages and setting the roles that control package access. To complete the tools discussion, we talked about the command prompt utilities that you can use to run or manage packages.

After the discussion of concepts and tools, this chapter provided examples of commonly occurring scenarios in each phase of the life cycle of an Integration Services solution, including detailed information about how to configure and use Business Intelligence Development Studio and how to do tasks related to the development, deployment, and management of Integration Services packages.

This chapter did not cover all the individual tools that Integration Services provides to configure connections and the control flow and data flow elements in packages. For example, we touched only on the tools for the control flow elements that implement looping, the For Loop and Foreach Loop containers that are new in Integration Services. Books Online, the documentation, provided with SQL Server 2005, contains information about the many tools that you can use to configure the tasks, sources, transformations, destinations, and connection managers that Integration Services includes.