Programming SQL Server 2005

Chapter 15. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a platform for building data integration and workflow solutions and extract, transform, and load (ETL) solutions for data warehousing. Common integration scenarios include merging data from heterogeneous data sources, populating data warehouses and data marts, standardizing data, and performing administrative functions such as backing up, copying, and loading data.

SQL Server 2005 provides graphical tools for constructing data integration solutions. You can also construct, maintain, manage, and run data integration programmatically using either native or managed code. This chapter provides an overview of SSIS and demonstrates SSIS managed-code programming.

Architecture

SSIS consists of four key parts:

Integration Services service

Manages storage of packages and monitors running Integration Services packages.

Integration Services object model

Comprises native and managed APIs for accessing Integration Services tools, command-line utilities, and custom applications.

Integration Services runtime

Saves the layout of packages, runs packages, and supports logging, breakpoints, configuration, connections, and transactions. SSIS runtime executables are the packages, containers, tasks, and event handlers that perform workflow functionality.

Data flows

Move data from source to destination with optional transformation. There are three types of data-flow components—source, transformation, and destination ...