SSIS 2012, Part 03 of 11: Data Flows and Tasks

The data flow task is a special control flow task that moves data from a data source to a data destination, optionally transforming the data in various ways as it moves. It is so important and complex that unlike any other control flow tasks, the data flow task has its own designer in SQL Server Data Tools. This is where you’re likely to spend most of your time when developing any non-trivial Integration Services package that moves data rather than just performs other control flow tasks. As a data flow moves data from a source to a destination, you can perform various data flow transformations on that data. These transformations tasks let you look up data from an external source change the contents of a field to upper case sort the data, merge the data flow with other flows, and much more. The data flow task is the single most important task in a control flow and performs the majority of the work in an ETL, Extract, Transform and Load, an ETL process. In this course you’ll learn about the various components that you can use to build the data flow. Including the various data sources and destinations that you can use to read data and store it in its final resting place. Then you’ll learn about the transformations that you can use to modify the data and its scheme as it moves through the data flow pipeline. You can change a fields data type, modify its contents, split the data flow in to multiple pipelines, merge data flows, perform various kinds of look up, and much more. Data flows are key part of Integration Services and its well worth the time getting to know them well.

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