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The Business Intelligence Development Studio
The Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) is the central tool that you’ll spend most of your
time in as a SQL Server 2005 SSIS developer. Like the rest of SQL Server 2005, the tool’s foundation is the
Visual Studio 2005 interface (shown in Figure 1-2), which is the equivalent of the DTS Designer in SQL
Server 2000. The nicest thing about the tool is that it’s not bound to any particular SQL Server. In other
words, you won’t have to connect to a SQL Server to design a SSIS package. You can design the package
disconnected from your SQL Server environment and then deploy it to your target SQL Server you’d like
it to run on. This interface will be discussed in much more detail in Chapter 3.
Figure 1-2
Architecture
SQL Server 2005 has truly evolved SSIS into a major player in the extraction, transformation, and
loading (ETL) market. It was a complete code rewrite from SQL Server 2000 DTS. What’s especially nice
about SSIS is its price tag, which is free with the purchase of SQL Server. Other ETL tools can cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars based on how you scale the software. The SSIS architecture has also
expanded dramatically, as you can see in Figure 1-3. The SSIS architecture consists of four main
components:
❑ The SSIS Service
❑ The SSIS runtime engine and the runtime executables
❑ The SSIS data flow engine and the data flow components
❑ The SSIS clients
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Welcome to SQL Server Integration Services
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