Professional SQL Server® 2008 Integration Services

Chapter 2. The SSIS Tools

As with any Microsoft product, SQL Server ships with a myriad of wizards and tools to make your life easier and reduce your time to market. In this chapter you learn about some of the tools that are available to you and how to create your first basic package. These wizards make transporting data and deploying your packages much easier and can save you hours of work in the long run. We start the discussion with the Import and Export Wizard, which allows you to create a package for importing or exporting data quickly. As a matter of fact, you may run this tool in your day-to-day work without even knowing that SSIS is the back-end for the wizard. The latter part of this chapter explores other tools that are available to you, such as Business Intelligence Development Studio.

Import and Export Wizard

The Import and Export Wizard is the easiest method to move data from sources like Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and text files to nearly any destination and is available across all the versions of SQL Server; even those that don't have SSIS. This wizard uses SSIS as a framework and can optionally save a package as its output prior to executing. The package it produces may not be the most elegant, but it can take a lot of the hard work of a package development and provide the building blocks that are necessary for you to build the remainder of the package. Oftentimes as an SSIS developer, you'll want to relegate the grunt work and heavy lifting to the wizard, and then do ...