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Part IX: Business Intelligence
What’s New in Integration Services for SQL Server
2012?
A lot. SSIS began with SQL Ser ver 20 05 as a dramatic rewrite of Data Transformation Ser vices from SQL
Server 2000. In addition to an entirely new design environment, SSIS introduced a suite of powerful
functionality with the Data Flow Task, a task that merited its own tab in the SSIS Designer. There were
a few changes made with the 2008 release; it used memory more effi ciently, the scripting environ-
ment was changed to VSTA, and C# was added to the scripting environment, but the basics remained
largely unchanged.But for SQL Server 2012, Microsoft’s SSIS Product Group spent much time and effort gathering feed-
back on the use (or lack of use) of SSIS. This feedback resulted in feature changes targeted at easing
the learning curve for new users and encouraging adoption by previous reluctant users. Following are
the three main categories of the changes:- UI/Usability enhancements: The “ramp” geared toward easing the SSIS learning curve for
new users and slow adopters.
■ (^) A modern look and feel — new icons, round edges. Connection managers have icons on
them to indicate they use an expression.
■ (^) A new custom and customizable SSIS toolbox SSIS no longer uses the Visual Studio
toolbox, which makes installing Toolbox extensions much more streamlined.
■ (^) Flexible order of authoring; the ability within the data fl ow designer to edit a component
regardless of its connection state. It also enables previously confi gured components to
retain their metadata and provides the Resolve References Editor to remap unresolved
columns.
■ (^) Undo and Redo capability.
■ (^) Better copy and paste functionality.
■ (^) Annotations are word-wrap–enabled. No more Control + Enter! They are also stored in
plain text instead of binary.
■ (^) Breakpoints are now available inside script components.
- SSIS Project Model: SSIS Projects now contain related packages with the designed intent
deployed, confi gured, and executed related packages as one unit. To this end, a new object
called Parameters, which behave much like variables but that can be scoped to the Project
level, has been introduced. There is much more on parameters later in this chapter. - SSIS Server improvements: These changes are geared to the DBA charged with executing
ETL packages he/she did not write, and who may be in a locked down environment. There
is the new SSISDB catalog, available in the database connection of SSMS; new execution
tools inside SSMS to execute packages using the Project Deployment model; and new log-
ging features in SSMS that can be viewed regardless of the logging features programmed
in each package.
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