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Chapter 1: Welcome to SQL Server Integration Services
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Half of these transformations are used in servicing Analysis Services. To continue that theme, one task is
available only in Enterprise Edition — the Data Mining Query Task.
Summary
In this chapter, you were introduced to the historical legacy and the exciting new capabilities of the SQL
Server Integration Services (SSIS) platform. We looked at where SSIS fits into the Business Intelligence
roadmap for SQL Server, and then dove into an overview of the SSIS architecture. Within the architecture
we stayed up at 20,000 feet to make sure you have a good understanding of how SSIS works and the core
parts of the architecture. We talked about the core components of tasks, Data Flows, transformations,
event handlers, containers, and variables — all crucial concepts that you ’ ll be dealing with daily in SSIS.
Packages are executable programs in SSIS that are a collection of tasks. Tasks are individual units of
work that are chained together with precedence constraints. Lastly, transformations are the Data Flow
items that change the data to the form you request, such as sorting the data.
In the next chapter, you look at some of the tools and wizards you have at your disposal to expedite
tasks in SSIS. In Chapter 3, we do a deep dive into the various tasks in the Toolbox menu that you can
use to create SSIS workflows, then move on to containers in the following chapter. In Chapter 4, we circle
back into the Data Flow Task and examine the data components that are available to use within the data
pipeline to perform the transform in ETL.
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