Today we did the 2nd webcast of the series (considering that last week’s got rescheduled to 4/27 immediately following the regularly scheduled webcast). The topic was Integration Services, and we went through a series of examples of how to use the various transformation tools to play with the data. Some good questions came out of it, thought I would post the answers here…
For a good book on SSIS 2005 check out WROX’s book SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. Brian Larson also has some great titles on BI that you might find useful such as Delivering Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005.
You can import SQL 2000 dts packages into SSIS 2005, but some of the scripting stuff is going to need to be looked at. Plan to spend some time with the results, but it should be worth the efforts.
The nice thing about SSIS 2005 is that you can use it to pull data from just about anywhere and send it to just about anywhere. You’re not limited in any way to the data actually residing in SQL 2005. This means I could pull data from Oracle and load to Access (why I couldn’t say), but the package would need to be deployed to a SQL 2005 machine that has the appropriate access rights set up correctly.
Hopefully you can join me next week when we’ve got a double header. We’ll do the regularly schduled webcast on Reporting Services, and then immediately following we’ll do the rescheduled Analysis Service webcast where we build a cube.
ENJOY!