SQL Integration Services
The night started off with Douglas McDowell telling me there were between 80-90 people signed up for the session!  Wow that is a lot of people to sign up for one user group.  Luckily we had a great sponsor who bought enough pizza for all of us.  I think there was only part of a veggie pizza left at the end.  We had to get creative with how to set up the seats because the room is getting close to capacity with the number of people getting interested in the new features of SQL Server.

Leslie Sistla, one of Microsoft’s Senior Database Technology Specialist, gave the AtlantaMDF group an introduction to the new SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).  She also showed mentioned the entire SQL platform with SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS.  It appears that they have created these products as solutions to common problems in the industry to make their database a more powerful tool.  She briefly touched on the new features of each of the three products such as there are 5 new algorithms for data mining and there is infinite drill down for Reporting Services.

You may be asking what SSIS solves in the new version.  One of the key points that SSIS tries to solve is to be fastest for greater volumes of data.  If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet on how much data SSIS can process on a laptop, ask a Microsoft person or one of the SQL UG leaders to show you.  SSIS can now process a ton of data in no time at all.  Another problem that SSIS tries to solve is to collect data from diverse data sources.  You may have many different locations and types of databases that your data comes from and you want to be able to still have access to those sources.  The last key problem is today there are more diverse destinations people are trying to send the data to.  SSIS tries to make data available to more people and with more destinations.  Performance was one of the primary goals and the way the get the performance is that everything is now in a pipeline.  She said that the processing is more ELT, but that it is still called ETL (extract, transform and load).  She also said SQL Server is driven for performance. 

We went on to see some demos and everyone enjoyed seeing the new BI Studio tool.  This is a one stop shop for creating, deploying, and maintaining your application during development.  Now if there is more than one window you would need to look at for a task there are multiple tabs for those windows.  The main tabs used for SSIS are workflow and dataflow.  Most of the talk was on workflow vs dataflow and there were many definitions that she covered.  We saw many demos and how to create a new project.  One of the demos was even put together during the meeting, the example only took about 10 minutes total to put together even while she was talking.  There were a ton of controls, but if you need to you can still extend the ones that are there.  The event handlers have been tremendously improved and all of the projects are now stored in XML so you can store them in Source control.  At the end she showed us how to deploy the project and how easy it is to create a deployment package.

--Brendon Schwartz