Chapter 13
Accessing Heterogeneous Data
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Dealing with Excel and Access data
- Integrating with Oracle
- Working with XML files and web services
- Extracting from flat files
- Integrating with ODBC
In this chapter, you will learn about importing and working with data from heterogeneous, or various non–SQL Server, sources. In today’s enterprise environments, data may exist in many diverse systems, such as Oracle, DB2, Teradata, SQL Azure, SQL Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), Office documents, XML, or flat files, to name just a few. The data may be generated within the company, or it may be delivered through the Internet from a trading partner. Whether you need to import data from a spreadsheet to initially populate a table in a new database application or pull data from other sources for your data warehouse, accessing heterogeneous data is probably a big part of your job.
You can load data into SQL Server using SSIS through any ODBC-compliant, OLE DB–compliant, or ADO.NET managed source. Many ODBC, OLE DB, and .NET providers are supplied by Microsoft for sources like Excel, Access, DB2, FoxPro, Sybase, Oracle, Teradata, and dBase. Others are available from database vendors. A variety of Data Source Components are found in SSIS. These include Excel, Flat File, XML, ADO.NET (which is used to connect to .NET Sources), OLE DB (which allows connections to many different types of data), and Raw File (a special source used to read data that has been previously exported to ...
