Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

19.1. Creating an Integration Services Project

At this point, it may come as no surprise that a data source formulated for use in Integration Services isn't any different than a data source formulated for use with Analysis Services. Not only that, but Data Source Views play the same role across both Integration Services and Analysis Services. A great benefit of having a common data source is to share it across multiple SSIS packages. Perhaps you recall from earlier in this book that Data Source Views are similar to views in SQL Server. If you want to work with a limited set of tables, that is, a view in the relational world, you can emulate that using a Data Source View when creating SSIS packages. If you want to use the same table more than once for certain operations, you can create named queries, all of which utilize a shared data source connection in turn. You learn more about these capabilities when creating an SSIS package.

19.1.1. The Integration Services Task

In this chapter you learn specifically about Analysis Services-related tasks, but you should know that there are many control flow items (most of which are tasks) and several maintenance plan tasks. Examples of commonly used tasks are the Send Mail task, which is used to notify the administrator of job status; the Bulk Insert task, which is used to insert data from flat files into tables at high speed; and the Data Flow task, which contains a number of transforms internally — a container that helps to complete tasks ...