SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a tool used for data integration and workflow applications. Businesses and organizations often use SSIS to extract, transform and load (ETL) data from various sources e.g., the moving of databases and flat files into a centralized location like a data warehouse or a business intelligence system.
Benefits of using SSIS
SSIS’s business value and benefits lie in its ability to automate and streamline the ETL process. Benefits include:
Data Integration and Migration: With SSIS you can integrate data from various sources, such as XML data or flat files, into centralized locations, where it can be analyzed. Furthermore, SSIS can be used to move data between systems and databases.
Data Cleansing: SSIS can clean, transform, and validate data when it is migrated. Having clean data improves the quality of the data and ensures that the data is always ready for use, simultaneously making it more useful for analysis and reporting.
Automation: SSIS allows for the automation of the integration and cleansing of data. For a business, this can help increase efficiency whilst reducing the amount of manual work.
Using SSIS can help a business improve the quality accuracy and availability of its data, whilst freeing up labor through automation. All this combined helps the business or organization make better and more informed business decisions. The ability to handle large amounts of data, having support for a wide selection of data sources and destinations combined with a graphical design interface makes it easy for a business to maintain its ETL processes.
SSIS and database administrators (DBAs).
Database administrators (DBA) use SSIS to manage and maintain data integration within a business. DBAs also use SSIS for the process of designing, developing, testing, and deploying ETL packages, along with monitoring and troubleshooting data integration.
SSIS for building a data warehouse: SSIS is often used to extract and load data when building a Data warehouse. SSIS can clean and transform the data as it is loaded into the Data warehouse. This ensures that there are no duplicates, that all the data types are converted, and that calculations are applied, making the data in the warehouse better for analysis and reporting.
The automation features of SSIS can be used to schedule tasks like data backups, indexing and partitioning, and performance optimization of the data warehouse.
If you are moving from SQL on-premises to Azure cloud, SSIS is still relevant, as it can be used to perform data integration tasks between your on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQSL databases or other Azure services such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake, and Azure Data Warehouse. In addition to being able to extract data from on-premises databases and load it into Azure data services, SSIS can also extract data from Azure services and load it into on-premises databases.
Microsoft also provides Azure-SSIS integration runtime (IR), which allows you to run SSIS packages on Azure. With this, you can take advantage of SSIS capabilities on the cloud.
We have a strong team of DBAs and SQL consultants with a high level of expertise and extensive experience working with SSIS that can help your business find the optimal solution and setup that fits your needs.
Through monitoring, maintenance, tuning, and other proactive/preventive tasks, our DBAs ensure that our customers’ data is safeguarded without any downtime or further complications.
Read more about what a DBA/database consultant does >
Read more about our Managed Services >
Meet two of the employees: