Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) is a platform for building high performance data integration solutions, including the extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) packages for data warehousing. Integration Services includes graphical tools and wizards for building and debugging packages; tasks for performing workflow functions such as FTP operations, executing SQL statements, and sending e-mail messages; data sources and destinations for extracting and loading data; transformations for cleaning, aggregating, merging, and copying data; a management service, Integration Services Service, for administering Integration Services; and application programming interfaces (APIs) for programming the Integration Services object model.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to use SSIS Designer to create a simple Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services package. The package that you create takes data from a flat file, reformats the data, and then inserts the reformatted data into a fact table. In following lessons, the package will be expanded to demonstrate looping, package configurations, logging and error flow.