Chapter 8. The Stock Tasks

In This Chapter

• Common Task Conventions

• Task Groups

• The Workflow Tasks

• The Scripting Tasks

• The Data-Processing Tasks

"SO, IT'S JUST NOT AS FUN TO TWIRL YOUR OWN."

ROB YOUNG

This chapter is an introduction to the stock tasks, the standard tasks that ship with Integration Services. Integration Services ships with many tasks that provide a wide range of functionality based on a broad set of technologies. This chapter provides a general explanation of each task, highlighting their more notable features, their purpose, how to set them up, some tips and tricks, as well as some of their less-documented properties. The preceding chapter, Chapter 7, "Grouping Control Flow with Containers," covered in detail the common properties and behavior for all tasks. If you haven't read that chapter, it would be worthwhile to review it before proceeding here, because this chapter references those commonalities. In the interest of brevity and to make this chapter manageable, this chapter only covers the stock tasks.

Some sample packages are provided to help you understand stock task basics: how to set up the tasks, how they work, and when to use them. Although not earth-shattering, each package gives you a quick template to draw from when building your own packages. With Integration Services, one thing is clear; solutions and packages can be quite complex, but, in the end, they're really just combinations of very simple elements. The packages in the sample solution are intended to give you a quick start to setting up tasks. Later chapters focus on combining these tasks into solutions. As you read about each of the tasks in this chapter, open the sample package and tinker with it a bit. That's the quickest way to learn how to set up and use each of the stock tasks.