SQL Server Integration Services
Create enterprise-class data integration applications
Use SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to implement the ETL operations that are required to build a data warehouse. SSIS provides:
The World’s fastest ETL tool
Connectivity to non-SQL Server, data sources e.g. Oracle, Teradata, DB2 mainframe, and ERP Systems
A scalable pipeline architecture that provides a multi-threaded 64 bit platform to transform your growing data volumes in narrower batch windows
A large number of built-in transformations to consolidate data from numerous systems, reduce data duplication, and clean dirty data. Out-of-the-box capability to manage slowly changing dimensions
Seamless integration with SQL Server Analysis Services to directly build Analysis Services cubes
Extensibility through the power of the Microsoft .NET Framework by incorporating custom scripts and components directly into your data integration flow
Integration of large volumes of data through lookups on large tables, such as customer dimensions
Built-in data profiling tasks that enable you to profile your source and target data
Use change data capture to identify operational changes without requiring expensive batch processing
Take advantage of rapid implementation of common data warehouse ETL scenarios by using the new MERGE Transact-SQL statement
The Business Intelligence Platform
Achieve enterprise scalability
Leverage SQL Server 2008 features such as data compression, partitioning, snapshot isolation, and 64-bit support, which enable you to build and deploy the most demanding applications
Increase query performance through enhanced parallel query processing and star schema query optimizations
Manage data warehouses effectively
Use an integrated management environment to monitor, manage, and tune all databases and associated services across your enterprise
Customize and extend the management environment and build additional tools by using SQL Management Objects (SMO)
Take advantage of improvements to the management of enterprise database applications, including enhanced support for large databases and more flexible management of distributed databases
Use SQL Server 2008 partitioning to partition large data sets into manageable chunks. Use online index management to reduce index maintenance complexity and downtime
Bring your data warehouse online faster by backing up and restoring only active partitions
Control the resource utilization of concurrent workloads with the new Resource Governor
Use data compression to reduce the storage costs and increase query performance by reducing I/O
Use backup compression to help reduce storage costs
