An Overview of SSIS

Most of us have been using Data Transformation Services (DTS) in the previous versions of SQL Server in order to manipulate or move data. With the introduction of SQL Server 2005, Microsoft has introduced a completely re-written version of DTS with a lot more new features which is now known as Integration Services. This new ETL platform is nothing but a set of utilities, applications, designers, components, and services all wrapped up into one powerful software application suite. The most attracting feature of SSIS is that the data movement and transformation is separate from the package control flow and management. There are two different engines that handle these tasks. Integration Services Data Flow engine takes care of the data movement and transformation whereas the Integration Services Run-time engine manages the package control flow. The motivation behind this article is that the SSIS API is not well documented in MSDN though you get an overall idea of what is going on. This article assumes that the reader is aware of the fundamental components of an SSIS Package.