I’ve been writing sometime now on Transact Sequel (TSQL) which is the microsoft version of
SQL and I hope those posts help clarify some major tasks in SQL server programming. In this new tutorial which l’m starting today because of the numerous request that I’ve been getting to provide this lecture free online and due to my basic concept of sharing knowledge as much as l can as long as l live on this wonderful mother earth, I’m taking this tremendous step to providing tutorials which will cover almost every aspect of SSIS.
Those of you who don’t know what SSIS is, its really one of the most used component of Microsoft BI tools that is used intensively mainly for moving data from one place to another and performing various types of transformations to the data. SSIS stands for Sequel Server Integration Services. The tutorials I’ll be providing is directed at individuals from every aspect of life, from beginners to professionals.
I will do my best to provide such a complete coverage of this wonderful tool so that, someone with basic programming knowledge and computer skills can follow it and after successfully grasping the entire concept of SSIS, confidently go out there and get a job and thank me later. That is the aim and l’m going to do just that. Before you get all hyped up and over confident, the tutorial is provided as it is and not warrantied, if something is not clear to you, google it. There are many articles around the web just about everything in SSIS. I can’t do videos at this time because l have very tight schedule so l decide to write the tutorials when l have some free time after work or over the weekend. This is a great opportunity and l encourage everyone to take advantage of it and learn it seriously because you can easily get a job in the computer industry with SSIS skills. Almost every company needs an SSIS developer nowadays and you can google the facts to find number of companies looking for people with this type of skill.
However, because of my tight schedule, l will not be very fast in providing new tutorials as l wish, but l’ll do my best to write at least one tutorial per week. Also, l’m human and l’m not perfect so if l make mistakes, please forgive me and feel free to correct it in a comment to help other readers to digest the right stuff.
OK, now lets have a general discussion about SSIS. As I said, it’s part of Microsoft BI tools. Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools consist of SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. All these tools are very important but you can get a job just having one of them as well. I did it the hard way by learning all of them so l can talk about almost everything in regards to the Microsoft BI Tools. I’m not going to talk about the History of SSIS because that’s not necessarily at this time but l just want to mention that, it was born out of DTS which stands for Data Transformation Services. DTS was the tool Microsoft provided as early as 2000 for Extraction, Transformation and Loading of data in databases. DTS lacked many services so Microsoft being wise wrote a complete tool from scratch and name it SSIS, which came bundled with SQL Server 2005. Even though there are still DTS functionality in SQL 2005 and 2008, it is recommended to totally forget about those functionality and completely go SSIS. There are always changes coming up in Microsoft products but this tutorial is based solely on SQL Server 2008 R2. There is 2012 SQL Server but l still believe people are in the process of converting to that version and if you know SQL Server 2008, you can do anything you want with 2012 with just little things to catch up on.
When you have the SQL Server 2008 R2 installed, it comes with Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) which is the platform for the Business Intelligence Tools. BIDs has environment for SSIS,SSAS and SSRS. Below is the snapshot of BIDS. It is based on Visual Studio targetted to Business Intelligence Development.
You can get to this screen after installing SQL Server 2008R2, which you can get a free trial from microsoft download site and also get the popular adventureworks database to help in following this tutorial. Here is the link to getting the server and the adventureworks 2008 database. The server is here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8158 and the adventureworks database is here http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109.
It is highly recommended to have the server and database installed to properly understand the upcoming tutorials, so get them and lets meet up next time to discuss the components and start creating our first SSIS project.
Thanks for reading.
