SSIS Tutorial for Beginners: What is, Architecture, Packages

SSIS stands for SQL Server Integration Services. It is a data integration tool that loads and transforms data between different platforms, such as databases and cloud platforms, or between relational and non-relational databases.

What is SSIS?

SSIS is a powerful tool for creating and managing data integration solutions. It can be used for various tasks, including extracting data from multiple sources, merging the extracted data into a single file, and loading it into SQL Server tables.

By using SSIS, you can:

• Import data from flat files into database tables or other destinations (such as Excel).
• Export database tables’ contents to flat files or Excel spreadsheets.

SSIS Architecture

SSIS is a data integration tool that allows you to perform ETL (extract, transform, and load) operations. It integrates with SQL Server and other data sources. SSIS packages are made up of control flow elements and data flow elements, which work together to process data in your environment.

The Control Flow contains tasks that define the order in which you want processing to occur. Tasks can execute code or connect to other tools like databases or web servers. The Data Flow defines how source files are transformed into destination files through various transformations, such as cleansing or aggregating data before sending it off somewhere else, like another database table or an Excel file format (.xlsx).

Packages and Connection Managers

The SSIS package is a container for SSIS control flow and data flow. It has two types of containers: Control Flow (container) and Data Flow (container). The control flow contains tasks that perform the main processing in your package, whereas the data flow consists of tasks that transfer data between different sources and destinations. It would help if you used connection managers to connect to source or destination data stores.

Control flow

Control flow is the sequence of tasks that you want to perform. It is the process of specifying the order in which tasks are performed.

Control Flow controls data flow between tasks and components, such as where a package should start executing and what files it needs to read from or write to at each step.

Data flow

A data flow is a task that can move data between the data sources and destinations. Data flows are used for the following purposes:

• Transform, cleanse, and validate data.
• Edit or reformat the content of individual records (or groups of records) by adding new columns or changing existing ones.

Data flows can also be used as part of an ETL process–that is, they can help you extract data from one source into tables in your database, transform it into another format, then load it into those tables again.

Conclusion

Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services is an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tool that helps you to load data from different sources into a database. It can be used for transformations and data cleansing before loading into the final destination.