Introduction


Several books have been written about SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)-in fact, the prequel to this book, Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2006), is commendable in the detail it provides on the tool. However, although many of the technology books out there are written well and are great reference guides when trying to accomplish something, applying the technology to a solution may not always be straightforward.

Case in point, any power tool you buy at your local hardware store comes with a user manual. However, looking through the index, it is quite apparent that the purpose of the manual is to show off the knobs and buttons of the tool. For example, if it is a power saw, it may describe how to raise and lower the saw blade, and how to angle the arm to cut a 45-degree angle. But nowhere in the documentation will you learn to build a dresser or construct a bed! Clearly, you would not expect this in a manual, especially given that the saw can be used for hundreds (if not thousands) of different purposes.

As you would expect, the case is similar for SSIS. The online documentation and the SSIS books written so far do a great job at describing how to use the FTP task, for example, to pull a file from a remote server, and how to connect to the file to then extract the data into a table. What the documentation and books don’t describe, however, is how to connect the dots and apply SSIS for a specific purpose. To be sure, many users of SSIS will be very happy with the online documentation to do some standard one-off tasks here and there. But when it comes to using the tool to build a solution, more information is required.

This book is about application-applying the functionality of SSIS to help you envision, develop, and implement your data processing needs.

Whom This Book Is For

For this book, we will be applying SSIS functionality to several common industry areas, including data warehouse extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL), data integration ETL, and advanced ETL development and administration. Therefore, we have targeted this book at three primary SSIS users:

  • ETL data architects

  • ETL developers

  • Database administrators (DBAs) responsible for SSIS

Many of you reading this book may have the background of other industry ETL tools such as Ab Initio, Informatica, and Ascential. Others of you may be all-too familiar with Data Transformation Services (DTS) as your ETL tool. Some of you may be SQL script experts (such as T-SQL or PL-SQL) and are able to build processing algorithms with scripting inside of a relational engine. If you have this background, then you will be familiar with general ETL concepts already, and this book will be your window into transferring your understanding of data warehouse ETL to SSIS.

If you are new to the world of ETL because of a new initiative in your company, or maybe even a self-imposed desire to get familiar with this skill, then you will learn from this book about the basics of ETL and how SSIS can be applied to the purpose.



Expert SQL Server 2005 Integration Services
Expert SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Programmer to Programmer)
ISBN: 0470134119
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 111

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