Nirav Shah said
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.
Danny Crowell said
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.
WiltDurkey said
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 a 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.
S. Taylor said
there is a lot of advanced features of SSIS that I needed to learn, that BOL and Google seraches were not helping with. This book was a great help.
It is advanced, and not meant to be your primary resource or used for learning SSIS.
Present said
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.
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