Learn SSIS : What is SSIS ?

What is SSIS? its a comman question been asked and searched on google and other search eagines, this indicates lots of people are looking for information on what exactly ssis is?

Well this post will cover the general defination of SSIS, and where exactly this technology is getting used..

SSIS stands for SQL SERVER Integration services, its an additional independent windows services which is basically used to manage ETL(Extract Transform and Load) operations or workflows in any datawarehousing solution. Yes you can it as a ETL development tool, using which we design the workflows and schedule it as per business needs. The business data movement is designed in the workflows(Packages) and then scheduled to automate the task.

The SSIS can be used in following scenarios:

1. Data movement across platforms

2. Data movement between different RDBMS (Oracel / DB2 / SQL SERVER/ Flat files)

3. Custom business workflow

4. Movement of data across applications

5. Perform Maintanence tasks on SQL SERVER

6. Perform Monitoring

7. Perform huge data movement like archieving or BULK Inserts etc

8. Looping over files or any dataset.

Etc..

So the advantage of using SSIS is :

For more complex processes, particularly those that involve heavy transforms, slowly changing dimensions, data mining lookups, etc, SSIS has three advantages.

1. First, it manages memory very efficiently, which can result in big performance improvements compared to T-SQL alone.
2. Second, the graphical interface lets you build large, complex and reliable transforms much more easily than hand-crafted T-SQL.
3. And third, SSIS lets you more easily interact with additional external sources, which can be very handy for things like data cleansing.

Features of SSIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Server_Integration_Services
So how do i install SSIS??

its simple, SSIS comes along with SQL SERVER, so when you install SQL SERVER you can get an option to install SSIS services too, you can download SQL SERVER from http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/express.aspx

Hope this post might be helpfull for biggners..

--The Learner..!!