Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Integration Services

Chapter 14. Programming and Extending SSIS

Out of the box, Microsoft provides a huge list of components for you in SSIS. When you find that none of them fits your job, you need to be able to create your own. Initially this can be a steep learning curve, but hopefully with the help of this chapter you will be able to overcome this. In this chapter you will focus on the pipeline—not because it is better than any other area of programmability within SSIS but because it will probably be the area where you have the most benefit to gain, and it does require a slightly greater level of understanding. It also allows you to see some of the really interesting things that Microsoft has done in SSIS. All forms of extensibility are well covered in the SQL Server documentation and samples, so don't forget to leverage those resources as well.

The pipeline, for all intents and purposes, is the way your data moves from A to B and how it is manipulated, if at all. You can find it on the Data Flow tab of your packages after you have dropped a Data Flow task into the Control Flow. There's no need to go into any more detail about where to find the pipeline in your package, as this has been covered elsewhere in this book.

Most people think that even the most timid or "code scared" DBAs, when faced with not having what they want in the SSIS box, will be able to do a very reasonable job of designing and building the component they need themselves. Because SSIS is now hosted in the Visual Studio shell, ...