The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

6.1. Getting Started

If you're an ETL system developer, you're ready to start moving some data around. If you're like most ETL developers, you've experimented with Integration Services and quickly decided it's both cool and exciting. When you start doing real work, you'll get frustrated because it's not as easy as it looks. Fortunately, after a—hopefully short—learning curve, it starts to be almost as fun and productive as it appeared in the demos. We'll try to keep that learning curve as short and gentle as possible.

We start this section by talking about the development environment, which we've already introduced in Chapter 4. We then encourage you to create a template package early in your development cycle, to make it easier for all your packages to use similar objects and styles. On the subject of development styles, we also encourage you to modularize your package development, creating a system of master and child packages. Don't try to stuff too much functionality into a single package.

6.1.1. Create Solution, Project, and Data Sources

Your ETL development process may well be the first time you use BI Studio. If you haven't already created a solution for your DW/BI project, do so now. Most teams will share a single solution for the Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services components of their solution. You may keep all your Integration Services packages in a single BI Studio project. If you create separate packages for the historical load and ongoing ...