2. SQL Server Integration Services
SQL Server Integration
Services (SSIS) is a data-integration and workflow-solutions platform,
providing ETL (Extract, Transformation, Load) solutions for data
warehousing as well as extractions and transformations. With its
graphical tools and wizards, developers often find that SSIS is a quick
solution for moving data between a source and destination. As such, it's
a great choice for migrating data between a local database and a SQL
Azure database. Notice, however, that the previous sentence says data. When you're using SSIS, the database and tables must already exist in SQL Azure.
NOTE
Volumes of information
(books, articles, online help, and so on) are available about SSIS. This
section isn't intended to be an SSIS primer. If you're unfamiliar with
SSIS, this section provides enough information to give you a foundation
and get you started.
If you're familiar at any
level with SSIS, you're probably wondering why it has the limitation of
only moving data. Several SSIS tasks can provide the functionality of
moving objects as well data, such as the Transfer SQL Server Objects
task. When asked about this task, Microsoft replied that SSIS relies on
SMO (SQL Server Management Objects)
for this task, and SMO doesn't currently support SQL Azure. In
addition, some of the SSIS connection managers use SMO and therefore are
limited when dealing with objects. Thus, the current solution is to
create databases and tables using straight SQL and then use SSIS to do
the actual data transfer. The following section illustrates how to use
SSIS move migrate your data from on-premise SQL to SQL Azure.
2.1. Creating an Integration Services Project
To create your project, follow these steps:
Fire
up Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) by choosing Programs
→ Microsoft SQL Server 2008 → Business Intelligence Development Studio.
When
BIDS opens and the New Project dialog displays, select Business
Intelligence Projects from the list of project types, and then select
Integration Services Project, as shown in Figure 6. Click OK.
You now see an SSIS package
designer surface. This surface has several tabs along the top: Control
Flow, Data Flow, Event Handlers, and Package Explorer, shown in Figure 7. This example uses the Control Flow and Data Flow tabs.
In Visual Studio, select View → Toolbox. The Toolbox contains a plethora of what are called tasks,
which are control and data-flow elements that define units of work that
are contained and preformed within a package. You use a few of these
tasks to migrate the data from your local database to your SQL Azure
database.
