Beginners Guide to SQL Server Integration Services Using Visual Studio 2005

The back cover of the book states that the intended audience is …“beginners in the developer track who are looking to get exposure to SSIS”. It was right on the money.

The book starts off with the great introduction to what SSIS is and what it is made up of. In then goes into, in depth, how to use Visual Studio 2005 to create, modify, debug and execute SSIS packages. The rest of the book is a series of Hands-On labs guiding you through different task like transferring date from xyz source to SQL Server, which I find to be the best way for me to learn a topic. There is one chapter on scripting with unfortunately for my task a bit simple. It would have been nice to see an advanced script, maybe something that calculated value and updated a column.

There were two things that the book was missing… It did not talk about the error handling or logging available in SSIS other than a mention that SSIS has it.

In summary, this is a great book for beginners to SSIS and DBA’s that what to start using Visual Studio to debug their SSIS packages.

This book is out and is available from Packt. For more information about this book, please visit: www.packtpub.com/sql-server-integration-services-visual-studio-2005/book