Today we have an editorial that was originally published on Aug 31, 2006 as Steve is traveling at DevConnections.

I've followed the development, release, and subsequent news on SQL Server 2005 for over two years now. It's been an interesting journey and I've had the chance to see some evolutions in the product over time as well as observe the reaction to different subsystems.

At the Colorado Code Camp, where I got roped into speaking, I was asked what I thought was the part of SQL Server 2005 that had the most impact. I'm not a heavy user of the product, but since I gather, edit, and follow the news I answered that Integration Services was one of the most written about, blogged about, newsworthy systems. It seemed more people were really excited about SSIS than anything else, despite the fact that I think the Service Broker and other technologies are "cooler" to me.

So when I saw some people knocking SSIS, as well as this blog post by Jamie Thomson, I decided this would make a good poll.

Is SSIS a professional data integration tool?

I'm not a BI guy, and not deep into the ETL world like many of you out there. However it does seem to me that while it may not offer all the features of tools costing thousands of dollars, it does a great deal of the things I need in a professional ETL tool.

Most of us don't deal with terabyte databases. We don't roll up data from 30 separate applications into one humongous data warehouse and then spin off a dozen cubes for different departments.

I've done some of that on a smaller scale and I thought DTS was up to the task most of the time. Sure the error handling wasn't great and there were times we had to restart things and do some manual cleanup or script editing, but it worked very well for most of my needs. From what I've seen of SSIS, it's more robust and does an even better job of being a professional tool I can use.

As to whether it's professional enough or enterprise ready, I'd like to know what you think.