SQL Server Integration Services

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a component of Microsoft SQL Server that helps organisations integrate data from multiple sources into a single location. It provides a user-friendly environment for designing, developing and executing data integration tasks.

SSIS streamlines the process of moving data between applications, databases and files. It provides a consistent platform for integrating all types of structured and unstructured data.

This on-premise ETL tool integrates seamlessly with the rest of the SQL Server family of products to enable organisations to improve business processes by rapidly consolidating and standardising data across disparate systems.

Integration Services provides:

  • A graphical user interface (GUI) for building packages containing data movement operations.
  • It has a library of built-in tasks that perform common data transformations. These tasks can be dragged and dropped into a package to perform an operation, such as sorting or filtering data.
  • It supports transactional control flow so that the entire process is executed in a single transaction. This means that if any part of the process fails, no change will be made to the database.
  • An SSIS catalogue database for storing, executing and managing packages.
  • Integration Services object model for creating packages programmatically.
  • Data quality services and data profiling and cleansing services.

SSIS is an on-premise tool, the equivalent Cloud tool that Microsoft offers in the cloud is Azure Data Factory (ADF)