Author: Kirk Haselden
Publisher: SAMS Publishing (www.informit.com/sams)
Published: January 2009
ISBN-10: 0-672-33032-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33032-2
Format: Soft cover, 792 pages
Price: $59.99 (plus free access to an online edition of the book after purchasing the hard copy version)
Unleashing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services
The opening chapter of the book “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Unleashed” serves two major purposes. First, it explains what SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) actually is (in brief, it is the successor to Data Transformation Services (DTS)), and secondly, why your company or organization might need it, either now or in the near future. Kirk Haselden, the book’s author, explains that Integration Services is, in reality, “many things to many people.” From his experience, it largely depends on whom you ask about the role of Integration Services as to the sort of response you will get. For instance, Haselden reports that “you might get different answers to that question ranging from descriptions such as a data import/export wizard, to an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tool, to a control flow engine, to an application platform, or to a high-performance data transformation pipeline.” In fact, Haselden confirms that all those responses are indeed correct “because Integration Services is a set of utilities, applications, designers, components, and services all wrapped up into one powerful software application suite.” And as to the reason, or more likely, multiple reasons, why your company could potentially benefit from Integration Services, again there is no single answer. Haselden says that “many people use Integration Services for enterprise extract, transform, and load purposes. Others use it for an IT management tool for doing things like backing up databases. Others use it as an integration tool for synchronizing multiple systems”, and so on.
The content of “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Unleashed” has been divided into the following eight major parts:
1. Getting started: as mentioned above, once you have been given an overview of what Integration Services is and of how it might be of use to your company or enterprise, the remainder of this opening part of the book is then spent discussing how to set up Integration Services as well as the new features to be found in Integration Services 2008, along with the steps that are involved in migrating to Integration Services 2008.
2. Integration Services basics: reading this part of the book is an ideal way to learn about the concepts that underpin this technology. For instance, the initial chapter in this part of the book introduces readers to BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio) which, as its name suggests, is a development environment for designing and creating business intelligence solutions. A subsequent chapter covers the building blocks of Integration Services whilst another one provides a quick start guide to building a package. To define what a package is, Haselden uses the following analogy in his book: “Packages are to Integration Services users what the canvas is to an artist or the field to the farmer. It’s the basic starting point for everything you do and the foundation on which Integration Services solutions are built. The first thing people do when designing a solution in IS is create a package. After you create a package, you can add other objects to it, gradually building it up into a solution.”
3. Control Flow Services: In this part of the book the focus is on what’s involved in building packages. Haselden points out that by carefully reading this section, as well as by working through the samples provided, it “should give those who are new to SSIS the basic skills necessary to find their way around in the designer.”
4. Management Services: This part of the book is all about managing packages – debugging them; troubleshooting them; diagnosing them; securing them; and hopefully, their eventual deployment. But be warned. Even Haselden regards content in these particular chapters as venturing into “some of the more challenging topics” associated with Integration Services.
5. The Data Flow Task: The five chapters that comprise this part of the book investigate, in depth, Integration Services’ high performance data transformation and integration engine, the Data Flow Task. Haselden describes the Data Flow Task as being the “data-processing heart of Integration Services, capable of consuming data from multiple diverse sources, performing multiple transformations in parallel, and outputting to multiple diverse destinations. It supports a pluggable architecture for stock components that ship with Integration Services, as well as custom components written by third parties.”
6. Solving common challenges: The purpose of this section of the book is to assist those IT professionals who are responsible for the ongoing management of Integration Services solutions. The first of the two chapters in this part discusses how to configure and deploy solutions, while the second chapter presents common challenges. Along with tips and tricks as well as the details of some SSIS best practices worth adopting, Haselden has also included a handy collection of resources – blogs, wikis, forums, and websites – where additional material can be sourced.
7. Advanced package concepts and patterns: The first chapter in this section contains that extra advice you’ll need when troubleshooting more complex packages. Haselden issues the warning that “Integration Services packages can sometimes be a head scratcher. Even practiced long-term users get smoked every once in a while. Over time, with a few practices and a little experience, this gets easier, but as user feedback has made abundantly clear, the learning curve can be a beast”. Haselden has written this particular chapter to share with readers “some hard-learned lessons for how to find and fix package problems.” The second chapter in this part of the book is concerned with building advanced packages.
8. Programming Integration Services: The last part of the book is the place to turn to when you are ready to build components that plug into Integration Services. Two chapters respectively teach you how build custom tasks and how to build custom data flow components. Note: when you purchase a copy of “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Unleashed”, you are also given access to, plus a license to use and freely distribute, a number of custom task and custom component projects. The license also allows you to “modify the components in any way you want for sale or redistribution.”
Haselden has written his book in such a way that you don’t have to start at the beginning and then religiously read through each chapter in turn until you reach the end. “Each chapter was written to stand alone as much as possible,” says Haselden. “Although some topics naturally rely on other previously discussed concepts, great effort was made to write the chapters so that each could be read independently.” But having said that, Haselden has also taken into consideration the fact that readers of his book will have varying needs and come from different IT backgrounds. For example, he is quick to explain that the first parts of his book are “appropriate for those seeking a high-level overview of Integration Services. The middle parts are appropriate for users such as database administrators, ETL developers, and data architects. The last part is appropriate for those interested in writing custom components or simply better understanding how Integration Services works ‘under the covers’.” The topics introduced and discussed throughout the book are supported by the use of samples. Diligently working your way through all these samples is mandatory if you want to learn as much as possible about Integration Services. Code that has been used throughout the book can be downloaded from the site of the book’s publisher, SAMS Publishing (www.informit.com/title/9780672330322). At that same address, you can also gain access to sample content from the book, with both the foreword and the opening chapter titled “What Is Integration Services and Why Do I Need It?”, available in PDF format.
“Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Unleashed” is one of the many books in the “Unleashed” series. The series’ publisher, “InformIT”, states on its Web site that each of the books in its series is designed to provide “an exhaustive, technically sophisticated reference for professionals who need to exploit a technology to its fullest potential.” And having read a number of these books myself, I can attest to the accuracy of that particular statement. The series covers a diverse range of topics ranging from operating systems, networking, and programming through to databases and Web development. In turn, this wide coverage means that different books in the series can be of benefit all sorts of IT professionals – network managers, system administrators, developers, IT managers, architects, analysts, and business managers. At the time of writing this review, there were a total of 136 books in the series. Just three examples of other titles in the series include “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Integration Unleashed”; “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Unleashed”; and “System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 Unleashed”. Details of all the books in the “Unleashed” series can be found at www.informit.com/imprint/series_detail.aspx?ser=335232 For those unfamiliar with the name, InformIT represents the online arm of one of the world's largest educational publishers, Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson’s stable of technology publishing imprints include Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional, QUE, and Sams, the publisher of the book being reviewed here, “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Unleashed”.
In summing up, Kirk Haselden, the author of “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Unleashed”, is of the opinion that “Integration Services can be frustrating and difficult to learn”. And it is for those very reasons that the advice provided in Haselden’s book can substantially help you when it comes to mastering the technology.