Chapter 12. SQL Server Integration Services Overview

IN THIS CHAPTER

• New SSIS Features

• The SSIS Architecture

• The SSIS Toolkit

• Designing SSIS Packages

• The World of Wizards

• SSIS and Data Warehousing

In a typical enterprise environment, data is often stored in different formats and schemas in disparate sources. It is often necessary to extract and convert this data from different data types and formats into a unified format to be stored in a single destination or processed further for reporting. This task of moving, manipulating, integrating, cleaning, validating, and summarizing data in SQL Server 2005 can be achieved by using the technology called SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Formerly known as Data Transformation Services (DTS), SSIS has undergone a complete overhaul to improve performance, to provide better control over data flow, and to introduce conditional flow and looping. The basic architecture and programming object model have changed in SSIS to separate the different processes, such as management, the runtime, and data flow.

This chapter explores the SSIS platform by introducing you to the new SSIS architecture, the new control flow and data flow tasks, the new package authoring environment (the designer and wizards), and SSIS command-prompt utilities. Let's begin with an overview of new features introduced in SSIS.