Resource Recommendations - Integration Services (SSIS & DTS)

I'm often asked "what references should I have for ... <Insert Technology here>. "

For Integration Services (SSIS), the MUST HAVE "bible" text book is...

Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

SSIS2005

(See the link for ISBN & similar details)

Why do I love this book?

  • It is one of the few I've seen that covers how to extend & automate SSIS. If you want to programmatically create your own packages, write your own dataflow or workflow tasks or write your own source or destination adaptors this makes it easy. 
        If you are planning on enhancing SSIS designer, get Visual Studio Extensibility as well.
  • It has full chapters on most of the data flow & work flow tasks.
       When I was struggling to get it to work with Oracle & DB2, the tips here made it easy. Of course if you are interoperating with either Oracle or Teradata you should
  • This is not really a great book for learning but is it handy to have as a reference. Pick it up, read all about the task you need to work with. 

NB: This book was recently updated to SQL 2008. I've not read it yet.
 

Note: I define a "Bible" Textbook as THE book you should have have at your fingertips if you are working with that product.

 

Honourable mention ...

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

SSIS_Kirk
It is a tough call which to make the "bible" book. If you are starting from scratch this may be better for you. It also has good performance section & insight on internals.

On the authors

Kirk Haselden - at the time this book was written,the SSIS development team reported to him. Just data mining, it wasn't a big team, so he knew the code really well & knew why they designed it the way they did. He had ultimate say in how the product was coded & made many of those decisions. This insight is reflected in this book. This is a very comprehensive coverage & a good on to learn from.

"Bible" Web Site ...

SQL Server Integration Services - SSIS
The real value in this site is their free extensions to SSIS. eg: the File Watcher Task & Regular Expression Transformation are 2 of ~10 task you can use to extend capability of SSIS in new ways. Of course there are a tons of scripts, articles & presentations that are insightful too. The site has a new UI, which sucks compared to the old one. So click on the "Archive" tab, from there it is heaps easier to find everything.

Data Transformation Services (DTS) on the web If you are working with SQL 2000 DTS then this is the "Bible" site for you. Created & maintained by the same team as the SSIS site above. It also has useful extensions to SQL 2000.

Honourable mentions ...

SQL Server 2008 – Integration Services lots of resources & Webcasts on SSIS.

SQL Server 2005 – Integration Services same as above but for 2005

Great tools / add-ins

Microsoft Connectors for Oracle and Teradata by Attunity 
If you are interoperating with Oracle or Teradata you should download these drivers. They offer much better performance than that delivered out of the box. As a result of an agreement between Microsoft & Attunity they are provided to you at no additional cost.

Microsoft Connector 1.0 for SAP BI 
a set of managed components for transferring data to or from an SAP NetWeaver BI version 7.0 system. Part of the SQL Feature pack, scroll down to find it.

Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB2 

COM component for integrating data stored in IBM DB2 databases. Part of the SQL Feature pack, scroll down to find it.

DTS Xchange - If you need to migrate your SQL 2000 DTS solutions to SQL SSIS 2005/2008 this is the tool for you. It significantly extends the migration capability built into SQL 2005/8. You should definitely evaluate this prior to doing your upgrade.

SQLIS.com tools - Look in the downloads in the site mentioned above.

Great Blogs

SSIS Team Blog - Main Blog of the SQL Server SSIS Engineering Team

Douglas Laudenschlager - One of the main guys on the SSIS Documentation Team.

Michael Entin's notebook - Till recently Michael was a developer on the SSIS Team. Now working in a related group.

Rafael Salas (MVP) - SSIS Thoughts and Examples

Paul Ibison (MVP) - SSIS bits 'n' bobs BLOG

Brian Knight (MVP)

John Welch (MVP) - BI Thoughts and Theories

Matthew Roche (MVP) - BI platform and development technologies

Jamie Thomson's Blog called SSIS Junkie.

Thanks

Please give feedback. Is this type of info useful? Did it save you time? What was good, What could be better?, Notice any errors? What would you like me to cover? All thoughts, comments, suggestions welcome.

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