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Appendix A. SSIS Component Crib Notes

In this appendix you find a list of the most commonly used tasks and transforms in SSIS with a description of when to use them. Reference these tables when you have a package to build in SSIS and you are not sure which SSIS component to use to perform the needed actions.

When to Use Control Flow Tasks

Tasks	When to Use
For Loop Container	Use this container when you need to perform a task or set of tasks a certain number of times. This container will loop until a condition is false. The initial value of a number is set, and the value can be changed at each iteration of the loop. This task can be used to perform a loop until a condition is true, like a file existing.
Foreach Loop	Use this container when you need to perform a task or set of tasks for a list of objects. The object can be files, an ADO object, or an XML list. This container can look at each object and save the value in a variable to be used in each iteration of the loop. This is commonly used to loop through a set of files and load them each in a Data Flow.
Sequence Container	Use this container when you need to group tasks together. The tasks in the container will all finish before the container sends a message down the precedence constraint to the next task.
Bulk Insert Task	Use this task to load data from a flat file into a table. This is a very fast way to load data. The task loads all the data or none. No transforms can be performed on the data with this task.
Data Flow Task	Use this task ...