Every day for the next couple of weeks, I aim to highlight one of SQL Server 2008’s new features, simply for awareness. You can then go away and research the area and report back to me, we’ll then discuss how these new features can benefit us all.

 Wednesday 2nd June 2010

Improved functionality for SSIS

Now, Im not an active user in SSIS really. As the Data Warehousing empire continues to evolve, they have made improvements to the technology which you may or may not be aware of :-

Pipeline Improvements

Data Integration packages can now scale more effectively, making use of available resources and managing the largest enterprise-scale workloads. The new design improves the scalability of runtime into multiple processors.

Persistent Lookups

The need to perform lookups is one of the most common ETL operations. This is especially prevalent in data warehousing, where fact records need to use lookups to transform business keys to their corresponding surrogates. SSIS increases the performance of lookups to support the largest tables.

If there are any budding Business Intelligence enthusiasts out there who have installed and taken advantage of 2008 r2 and its BI capabilities – please post your experiences here.