Integration Services
SSIS is Microsoft’s Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tool. It offers a rich development environment for taking source datasets and running them through various processes of sorting, filtering, reshaping, and testing, followed by deployment of the modified data to a destination.
ETL becomes useful in a number of scenarios. For example, automated, unattended processing of flat files into a database, or periodic replication of data from one transactional system to another. You can also use SSIS to run administrative tasks, for example database backups, processing of Analysis Services cubes, or even data quality checks, as discussed in the previous section.
But in the realm of BI, the primary use for ETL is the transfer of data ...
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