SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is the ETL (Extract, Transformation and Load) tool in the Microsoft Business Intelligence suite. Microsoft changed the way they handle data loads completely with the introduction of SQL Server 2005, offering complete ETL functionality as opposed to mainly Extract and Load functionality available in earlier versions. The release of SQL Server 2012 introduced another significant improvement on previous versions, providing a new way of configuring packages for deployment. Once development of packages has been completed, the challenge is to deploy those packages from a development environment to test or production environment without having to manually reconfigure them for the new environment. Configuring packages in SSIS has not always been very easy. A main problem was the different possibilities that developers had, including XML configuration files, Environment variables, Registry entries, Parent package variables and SQL Server configurations.
ETL with Microsoft SSIS: First steps and common issues
First impression when using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), the developer’s first impression is the tool provides powerful features in addition is simple to use. Although this is true, there are some common errors that can make us waste our time. The purpose of this blog article is to cover some of these very common issues and save some time when starting to develop a solution with Microsoft SSIS.