Home
Tour
Download
Purchase
Local Cube Information Center
Samples
Support
About Us
Contact

 
The Local Cube Information Center

www.cubeslice.com

 

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.