Professional SQL Server® 2008 Integration Services

Chapter 12. Accessing Heterogeneous Data

In Chapter 11 you discovered how to incrementally extract data from sources with SSIS. In this chapter, you learn about importing and working with data from heterogeneous, or non–SQL Server, sources. In today's enterprise environments, data may exist in many diverse systems, such as mainframes, Oracle, DB2, 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, pull data from other sources for your data warehouse, or rely on a Web service to grab up-to-the-minute information, accessing heterogeneous data is probably a big part of your job.

You can load data into SQL Server using SSIS from any ODBC-compliant or OLE DB-compliant source. Many ODBC drivers and OLE DB providers are supplied by Microsoft for sources like Excel, Access, DB2, FoxPro, Sybase, Oracle, 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 (which is a special source used to read data that has been previously exported to a Raw File Destination). If the supplied Data Sources do not meet your needs, you can also create custom ...