Knight's Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 17

Creating a Data Flow

This lesson covers the basics of the Data Flow Task. Section 3 comprises lessons covering the sources, destinations, and transformations in detail. However, this lesson gives you the tools to get started creating a Data Flow and understanding its purpose.

The Data Flow Task is used to transfer data from a source to a destination and can transform the data as needed. The Data Flow Task is capable of handling large amounts of data. The source and destination can be any of several different types, such as a flat file or database, and can contain millions of rows of data. The destination can also be of several types.

You can use the Data Flow Task to extract data from a database and write to a flat file location or to move the data from a flat file to a database. This capability enables you to receive files from outside sources and write this data to your database. You can also use the Data Flow Task to move data from one database to another.

The transforms that exist in the Data Flow enable you to make changes to the data as you move it from a source to a destination. For example, if you are receiving flat files from a vendor and the data is not formatted correctly (say, the Social Security numbers need to have dashes) you can fix that before writing it to a database. Fixing things like that prior to writing to your database prevents you from having to run updates on your database later.

Additionally, these transforms are faster in SSIS. SSIS performs ...