Chapter 11: Migrating from DTS to SSIS

The SQL Server perfect storm is about to approach. SQL Server 2005 does still support Data Transformation Services (DTS) from a runtime perspective, but the next release of SQL Server may not. This gives you a small window of opportunity to upgrade your packages from DTS to SSIS using SQL Server 2005. This chapter discusses first how to run DTS from within a SQL Server 2005 environment, and then how to upgrade your DTS packages to SSIS. The first part of this process can be done through a wizard, but the conversion doesn’t stop when the package is migrated.

SQL Server 2005 DTS Backward Compatibility

Although SSIS is a completely new architecture that doesn’t resemble DTS at all, SQL Server 2005 still does ship with the DTS runtime engine. As you’ll see in this section, the DTS tools in 2005 are just good enough to run packages and perhaps tweak them, but not for full DTS package development. It becomes increasingly obvious that Microsoft wanted to provide people with a disincentive to using DTS going forward, by not providing the typically amazing management and design tools.