SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) overview

Thursday, 29 August 2013

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) overview

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

Overview
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a tool that we use to perform ETL operations; i.e. extract, transform and load data. While ETL processing is common in data warehousing (DW) applications, SSIS is by no means limited to just DW; e.g. when you create a Maintenance Plan using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) an SSIS package is created. At a high level, SSIS provides the ability to:

retrieve data from just about any source
perform various transformations on the data; e.g. convert from one type to another, convert to uppercase or lowercase, perform calculations, etc.
load data into just about any source
define a workflow

The first version of SSIS was released with SQL Server 2005. SSIS is a replacement for Data Transformation Services (DTS) which was available with SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000. SSIS builds on the capabilities introduced with DTS.

In this tutorial we will step through a number of topics that you need to understand in order to successfully build an SSIS package. Our high level outline is as follows: