In this post I will explain what is SSIS Package and how it is used. For more information how to create one visit our SSIS Tutorial page.
SSIS Package stands for SQL Server Integration Services and is part of Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence (BI) Stack. It is included in version 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2 (and soon Denali SQL 2011?). Previous version of SSIS was called DTS and was included in SQL Server 2000.
What is an SSIS Package ?
SSIS package is a tool to create ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process and as the name suggest the purpose of it is to extract data from source system (or multiple source systems) this can database, excel files, text files. Then it performs transformation which just means you can apply certain business rules to the data or clean it for instance you can clean customer address or group together customers which are the same person. The final step is load and it is loading the data into final destination which is usually a data warehouses database.
So the package contains all the information (in XML format with file extension .dtsx) which are then used my SQL Server Integration Service Engine which perform the actual actions specified. (You can also run it using SSIS designer which I will discuss next).
Where do I create SSIS Package ?
If you starting to develop a package to move data than in most cases you will use Visual Studio more precisely BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio). In BIDS you will be able to create new SSIS Project and create a package. For more info please see SSIS Tutorial page.
How to use SSIS package ?
You can execute ssis package from BIDS (usually for testing or one-off tasks), you can also execute it as a job (or scheduled job) and exeute it from stored procudure or another file (using dtexec.exe)
If you have any questions feel free to post a comment Hope that helps Emil
