Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

6.3. Administration of Integration Services Packages

Now that you've learned about the various aspects of Integration Services service administration, we'll now detail the main elements involved with the administration of SSIS packages. First you'll get an overview of SSIS package elements and administration, and then you'll look at various ways to create packages. Next, you'll look at the management of the developed SSIS packages. Once you understand how to create and manage packages, you'll move on to the deployment, execution, and scheduling of SSIS packages and solutions.

6.3.1. An Overview of Integration Services Packages

A package represents the main organizational and executable component of Integration Services. Packages include a collection of control flow tasks connected by precedence constraints used to manage the order of task execution, Data Flow Tasks that manage the complexities of moving data from sources to destinations with many transformation tasks in between, and event handlers responsible for communicating various information about the status of the package and its tasks.

In order to better understand the various package administrative functions, we'll start by discussing the flow of package creation or development. You start this process by designing a package using either the Import and Export Wizard or Business Intelligence Developer Studio. Next, you store these packages in either the file system or a SQL Server database (MSDB database, specifically) ...