Customer Reviews

Expert SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're new to Integration Services, this book is not for you. You should instead start with Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Programmer to Programmer). However, if you've already developed some skills with Integration Services (SSIS), but are still wondering how to best use this tool to perform ETL tasks, then you will definitely want this book at your side. The authors cover all of the subject areas they teach in the classroom (and more), which makes this a great reference book whether or not you're able to attend their training classes. Not only do Erik and Brian present alternative methods for accomplishing similar data integration objectives, they clearly explain the pros and cons of each approach. Another important subject they cover in the book is a thorough review of potential performance issues and suggestions for improving performance. Many books on SSIS do a good job of explaining the features and functions of SSIS, which this book does not attempt to replicate. Instead, the authors provide references to other sources for the basics, focus on information you won't find elsewhere, and give practical examples for deploying, maintaining, and tuning packages. For your ETL projects, this book is an indispensable guide.

As a professional consultant, I see a lot of books on technology that do a good job of explaining the parts of the technology but don't provide much value in the actual application of the technology. This is not one of those books...

I recently used this book as part of my own ramping up on SSIS, having a great deal of experience with SQL2000+DTS but no real hands-on experience with SSIS. I found the format of the book to be easy to follow and navigate; the samples and recommendations were particularly useful and I used them throughout a recent project, where we were delivering an reasonably complex ETL solution based on SSIS.

I would certainly recommend this book to my fellow consultants and to anyone looking for a useful and practical guide to using SSIS.

This book is true to its title of Expert. It goes beyond what you can find in Books Online and other SSIS books. The flow of the book is goes into more real world examples, which make the book a much easier read, then most technical books. You will find plenty of examples and images throughout each chapter.

I have been working with SSIS since its early CTP days and I find this book very useful.

Understand the 2 stars - they have nothing to do with the value or not of this book as a guide to doing Business Intelligence work with SSIS. I have _no_ opinion on that subject.

What I bought this book for was as an SSIS reference, for an ETL project I am working on. Now, if this book was titled "Advanced _Business_ _Intelligence_ using SSIS" I wouldn't have bought it. I researched this book in advance, and might have bought the companion Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Programmer to Programmer), if that book, also by WROX, hadn't generally been panned by its reviewers.

The focus of this book is to provide enough background to do advanced BI work. Yes, that does include concepts like deploying and debugging. It is probably good at that job, which is why it gets good reviews. Hey, it almost got me interested in BI. But there is surprisingly little outside of the BI target audience's interest. As a result, I've pretty much had to rely on Google, Google Groups and BOL (yeccch) instead of this book - every time I tried to look something up, I found it not to be covered.

An example of how thorough it is in general SSIS, non BI-coverage?

From p.19

"One of the most important types of container is the ForEachLoop container. With this container..."

OK, so this is one of the most important concepts, right? Yes, and it gets 2 paragraphs worth of coverage in the whole book, none of which tell you how to use it. 200 words, at most, to cover "one of the most important" types of container and they also consider containers to be important.

In case you wonder, I want to loop through a rowset and fire off Execute SQL tasks to update or insert rows in another database. While we are at it, SQL Tasks are also a subject deemed beneath the interest of this book.

Way to go Wrox!

The 3rd lame WROX book I've gotten and I am getting tired of the series. 'Programmer to Programmer', perhaps, but without the benefit of an editor in between, for sure.

p.s. Again, please disregard my review if you want to do BI work. This review only applies if you have a wider focus than BI-only work, for example wanting to use SSIS to wrap SQL statements outside of a programming language.

This book is different than other SSIS books in the way that it not only provides technical details and essential tips and tricks on how to use SSIS but it also explains the fundamental concepts of SSIS architecture and engine and goes beyond what you can learn from books online.

The chapters are nicely organized and take the reader through examples that can be used in real projects.

I tried to dive right into this book as my first exposure to SSIS 2005. I hate combing through tons of beginner stuff. Well, it was definitely for experts. I only made it through 3 chapters and gave up. I purchased the Proffessional companion title to this and got a much better foundation. This Expert book has helped me extend my knowledge of what I learned in the Professional book and perform some really cool automation in my projects.

I do not recommend this as your first exposure. Get the Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services book first.

Book is well written and considered the real world issue and work.

I am giving 4 star because it could be better by including more real world example and other features of SSIS.

But its good reference if you have basic knowledge and want to build complex solution.

This book was written a year or so after SSIS 2005 was released. It has some good best practice information forged from developing production ETL systems with SSIS. Some of the books released at the time of the product release lacked that perspective. I recommend this book.

There are lots of 5-star books with great content, but with poor samples. Unfortunately, this is one of those books.

Did anybody try the samples of Chapter 3? The sample of Figure 3-26 returns many records back (not empty as shown in the book), maybe because there is millisecond in the modified date field; the sample of Figure 3-27 does not work at all, because SSIS complains the value of timestamp field can not be assigned to that variable; the sample of figure 3-32 has no required flat file available in the downloaded zip file ...

There are solutions to fix them, of course. But, the samples do not work really annoyed me.

After reading his first book and attending an Integration Services training class taught by Brian himself[..] I was soon developing complex SSIS packages right out of the gate! Brian is one of the most passionate and dedicated professionals in his field. The Expert SSIS book is a wonderful follow-up to his first book and both are "MUST-HAVES" for SSIS. Bravo, Brian and Erik !!!