The Integration Services Team are blogging, plus a little history

Donald and Kirk are becoming prolific, Kamal promises to become so :-), Ash wants to

Kirks post here brings back scary memories. Let me explain...

The DTS Team was always amazingly small for what it delivered (as are many teams at MS, the Reporting Services team have done an amazing job for their size). Its tough to get a body count as we shared resources throughout the old tools team, but when we shipped SQL2000 we had;

Me, I was the PM for all of DTS and also the GPM for the Tools Team(think EM, QA, Profiler, Agent, DMO, OSQL, etc etc),

Ted2, was the only developer, he did work on the Wizard, the Designer, both object models(Package and Pump), DTSRun, DTSRunUI ...

Ilarie(a developer) worked 80% of the time on EM but did a little DTS.

Reggie, Terrence and Jun were all testers, that did the API testing (no UI) but they did DMO, XPs as well as DTS and Reggie was also the Test Manager for the entire team.

Jim we converted into a tester because he found such good bugs when he was writing documentation.

We had Ed as a writer, although he was also a Doc Manager and Kathy was our shared Editor with some other teams.

We had more(Ted1, Kishnan, Chang, Bill, Roger, Juan, ...) at the beginning of 2000 and for various reasons this is what we ended up with.

I want to say there was another tester but I can't remember as its a little late. So we had 3 people full time, plus a share of others, lets say it was 5.

When we started on SQL 2005 we knew DTS was somewhere we needed to invest heavily so we started hiring more people into the team. We farmed the new designer work out to the Analysis Services team that were building a new designer for Cubes, Data Mining and other areas and so it made sense to integrate DTS in there as well(although that team has since been merged back into SSIS). We bought a small company and the folks from there went into what we now know as the DataFlow Pipeline. This left us with the Workflow aspects of the DTS runtime. Kirk joined the team from the Home and Entertainment Division, having been working on hardware. We also hired some other folks into the runtime team.

I set out to be the PM for the runtime while we looked to hire one, I was still being the GPM of the team as well as doing some other stuff, so I was pretty busy and was in meetings or doing general team stuff from 10-5/6. So it became a tradition that kirk and I would meet in his office(he had my old one and still claims the toenail clippings on the floor when he moved in were mine, I offered to take a DNA test <g>) every night at 6 for a couple of hours and we would fill kirks whiteboard with ideas for looping, debugging, parameters, deployment, Error Handling, Compensating Actions, ... He would then take notes and work on designs and coding with his team. This went on for a couple of months and then we spun the DTS team off as a separate team and I went on to run the remaining tools team.

Its truly amazing to me how much the SSIS team has delivered in this release, its FAR more than we ever dreamed was possible in terms of features or perf in those early days, but some of those core principles and whiteboard scribbles are there.

Congrats to Kamal, Donald, Kirk and all the other non-bloggers on the SSIS team.