Book Image

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services: An Expert Cookbook

Book Image

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services: An Expert Cookbook

Overview of this book

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a leading tool in the data warehouse industry - used for performing extraction, transformation, and load operations. This book is aligned with the most common methodology associated with SSIS known as Extract Transform and Load (ETL); ETL is responsible for the extraction of data from several sources, their cleansing, customization, and loading into a central repository normally called Data Warehouse or Data Mart.Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services: An Expert Cookbook covers all the aspects of SSIS 2012 with lots of real-world scenarios to help readers understand usages of SSIS in every environment. Written by two SQL Server MVPs who have in-depth knowledge of SSIS having worked with it for many years.This book starts by creating simple data transfer packages with wizards and illustrates how to create more complex data transfer packages, troubleshoot packages, make robust SSIS packages, and how to boost the performance of data consolidation with SSIS. It then covers data flow transformations and advanced transformations for data cleansing, fuzzy and term extraction in detail. The book then dives deep into making a dynamic package with the help of expressions and variables, and performance tuning and consideration.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services: An Expert Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Parameters: Passing values to packages from outside


Packages need to be configurable from outside. Different environments may need different configuration for executing SSIS packages. Parameters are designed to get values and configuration from outside of package, and their main benefit is that they can be configured after deployment, so there will be no need to compile the package after changing the parameter's values.

Parameters can be used within SSIS packages in expressions or as variables, but don't use them counterproductively. Variables are designed to pass values inside package, and parameters are designed to pass values from outside of package.

SSIS Catalog has the ability to pass parameter values with predefined configuration which is called environment. Environments are designed to add multiple configurations and use them as needed.

In this recipe, we will create a data transfer scenario to log all tables' name and number of rows into a database table. We will create two packages...