Knight's 24-Hour Trainer: Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Integration Services

Chapter 4. Creating a Solution and Project

You cannot create an SSIS package in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) without first having a solution and project. Additionally, for execution of the package in debug mode, your package must be in a project and solution. Projects and solutions are containers for your packages that help you keep every component together and make you a more efficient SSIS developer.

BIDS is the program where you're going to develop your SSIS packages. In SQL Server 2008, BIDS is a Visual Studio 2008 shell. You can either open BIDS by itself under the SQL Server 2008 program group or open it by opening the full Visual Studio 2008 program.

An SSIS project is a container of one or more packages and other SSIS components. All the Visual Studio suite of products use the project construct to hold their files. For example, Reporting Services uses projects to hold its reports, and VB.NET uses projects to hold its VB.NET class files. In general, you want to align an SSIS project with a business project you're working on. For example, you may have an SSIS project called "Data warehouse ETL."

A solution is a container of one or more projects. Solutions enable many disparate types of projects to live under one container. For example, you may have a solution called "Enterprise Data Warehouse" with a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) project called "Data warehouse reports," another project for SSIS called "Data warehouse ETL," and a final one for C# called ...