Professional SQL Server® 2008 Integration Services

Chapter 3. SSIS Tasks

SSIS tasks are the foundation for the Control Flow in SSIS. When you are on the Control Flow design surface in BIDS, the toolbar is populated with a set of Tasks components that can be snapped together to represent a logical or control workflow for your package. What you might not know is that tasks may also be used to define Control Flows in response to an event raised somewhere in the package. In either case, using Task components to map out the logical sequence of actions for a package is probably the most similar aspect that SSIS has to the legacy DTS product.

A task is a discrete unit of work that can perform typical actions required by an ETL process from moving a file and preparing data sources to sending email confirmations when everything is complete. This is most evident in the fact that the Data Flow is tied to the controller flow with a specific Data Flow task. More advanced tasks enable you to perform actions like executing SQL commands, sending mail, running ActiveX scripts, and accessing Web services. If you look at the toolbar, you'll see there is a large list of tasks that you can use out-of-the-box for ETL package development and a few that are more enterprise application integration (EAI) related. Most of the tasks are covered in this chapter, however some in less detail, since they are covered in other chapters. The exception will be the Looping and Sequence Containers, which are covered separately in Chapter 4. This chapter introduces you ...