Recently I got hold of a copy of Kirk Haselden's book "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services"
For those that don't know, Kirk was the Development Manager for SQL Server Integration Services 2005 so what he doesn't know about the product really isn't worth knowing. I know that Kirk spent many painstaking hours writing the book -I can remember getting emails from him at 10am GMT, 2am to him- all because he was striving to get the book out. The effort was worth it though because this tome really is the essential guidebook to building SSIS packages.
Straight from the outset Kirk's gregarious personality shines through. He is an avid collector of quotes from people around him and each chapter begins with a sample from this collection, most of them from members of the SSIS development team. One of the things I really like about the book is that it humanises the people that are responsible for delivering SSIS to us - by the time you've read it the names of Jim Howey, Mike Blaszczak, Matt David, Ash Sharma, Cim Ryan, Donald Farmer and many others will be very familiar to you. Kirk also loves to fill the book with anecdotes and they serve as pleasant interludes to the technical material. We learn thru these anecdotes how expressions in the data-flow made it into the product (and how they nearly didn't). And did you know that NASA once lost billions of dollars thru a malfunction on a spacecraft which was attributed to a particular file of source code not being added into a source control system correctly? I didn't before this book (check page 353).
Where the book really excels though is the technical content. In many cases Kirk delves into explaining why something works the way it does rather than just how and that sort of insight can only be gotten from someone with Kirk's unique standpoint. There's a whole chapter devoted to variables just in case the importance of them was not obvious.
My favourite chapter though is the one that is dedicated to exploring the internals of the data-flow. Anyone that has made the leap from DTS to SSIS can't fail to be impressed with the fantastic piece of technology that is the SSIS data-flow but the inner workings of it are largely hidden from us. Kirk introduces us to the buffer architecture of the data-flow and helps us to understand how it does what it does - and that is invaluable information for trying to debug and tune your data-flows.
To top it all off there's some great sample material available including:
- A SSIS expresson evaluator
- File encrypter/decrypter
- A component to read metadata from a .jpg file
- Data profiling tool
In summary, this is a superb piece of work and should be an essential desktop companion for any SSIS developer. Get it from Amazon here.
-Jamie