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

Variables and data types


If you've got some experience building Integration Services packages, you probably already know that SSIS has its own representation of different data types. The names of these data types start with DT_, followed by the data type such as I for Integer, BOOL for Boolean, STR for String, and so on.

Each time we move data from a source to a destination, conversion between input and output data types is required. The following figure shows a list of the most used data types and their relationship between different environments.

To get further details about SSIS data types , refer to the Working with Data Types in the Data Flow topic in Microsoft SQL books online at the following URL:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345165(v=SQL.110).aspx.

Getting ready

To get started with this recipe, follow these steps:

  1. Open SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and create a new SSIS project.

  2. Provide a name and a location for the SSIS project and proceed.

  3. Select...