Brief Introduction to SSIS

SQL Server Integration Services (Introduction)

         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:

• Extract or retrieve data from just about any source. e.g OLEDB source,Excel source,etc.
• 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 order to successfully build an SSIS package these are the steps to Follow.........

• Creating SSIS packages with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
• Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS)
• Creating a simple SSIS package in BIDS
• Deploying SSIS packages
• Executing SSIS packages 

  In next post I will demonstrate how to create a simple SSIS Package.