Expert SQL Server™ 2005 Integration Services

1.2. SSIS Review

Many of you have practical, learn-on-the-go experience using SSIS, and are looking to this book to take your knowledge to the next level and to fill in any knowledge gaps. Others of you have a good book knowledge of SSIS and want to extend your skills. And there may be those of you (like us) who like to dive right in, skip the intro books, and go right for the expert material.

To set the stage and provide a common starting point, we will walk you through a package creation that involves many of the SSIS key concepts. It's impossible to wrap all the SSIS functionality into this one example, but you will get a good review of the basic features. If you feel you already know how to use the basic SSIS features comfortably, feel free to skip this section. The ensuing discussions, however, assume that you know some of these basic concepts and will not walk you through these steps again. You should be familiar with some basics such as how to create a solution. This example assumes some SSIS background, so if you need a more fundamental review, see one of the starter SSIS books available such as Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Wiley Publishing, 2006).

In this package creation walk-through, you will start by developing a simple package Data Flow that pulls a limited range of data (by using package variables) from a source and adds some data transformation steps. Since SSIS includes more than just processing data, you will then be working with the control ...