The Checklist for Using Integration Services

Integration Services and Analysis Services are the primary Microsoft Business Intelligence tools. Integration Services gives you a tool for transforming your data into a format that can be used for Business Intelligence. Analysis Services is a tool for building and managing OLAP and data mining structures.

You don't need to know everything about Integration Services to use it effectively in a Business Intelligence system. My checklist only includes the features that are nearly always important for a Business Intelligence system. Other features may also be important, depending on your particular situation.

Here is the checklist for Integration Services:

• We know how to read and write SQL statements, including the ability to use inner and outer joins.



• We know how to create and manage database indexes to optimize the performance of the data load and retrieval.



• We know how to read and write code in at least one scripting language.



• We know how to import data from a variety of data sources.



• We are familiar with the variety of data flow components and how they can be used efficiently.



• We are familiar with the available transformations and, especially, the business intelligence transformations.



• We know how to load fact tables.



• We know how to load dimension tables.



• We know how to update dimension tables.



• We know how to control the flow of execution in Integration Services.