Professional SQL Server® 2008 Integration Services

Chapter 8. Creating an End-to-End Package

Now that you've learned about all the basic tasks and transforms in SSIS, you can jump into some practical applications for SSIS. You'll first start with a normal transformation of data from a series of flat files into SQL Server. Next you'll add some complexity to a process by archiving the files automatically. The last example will show you how to make a package that handles basic errors and makes the package more dynamic. As you run through the tutorials, remember to save your package and to a lesser degree your project on a regular basis often to avoid any loss of work.

Basic Transformation Tutorial

As you can imagine, the primary reason that people use SSIS is to read the data from a source and write it to a destination after it's potentially transformed. This tutorial walks you through a common scenario where you want to copy data from a Flat File Source to a SQL Server table without massaging the data. Don't worry; things will get much more complex later in your next package, and the next package will build on this example.

Start the tutorial by going online to the website for this book and downloading the sample extract that contains zip code information about cities. The zip code extract was retrieved from public record data from the 1990 census and has been filtered down to just Florida cities to save on your download time. You'll use this in the next tutorial as well, so it's very important not to skip this first tutorial. You can ...