Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) is Platform or just a Tool !

Many of us would debate for hours together if SSIS is a tool or platform. Most of our technical fraternity generally see this product as tool and as an extension to DTS Import/Export of Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

In Microsoft's word:

"Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) is a platform for building high performance data integration solutions, including extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) packages for data warehousing."

While developers experience lot of ease while developing solutions using SSIS as it leverages the capabilities of Visual Studio, on the other hand, Architects manipulate its flexibity to connect and extract data from different sources and load data a very high speed, taking the advantage of opening a pipepline to the destination from SSIS middleware server.

This also helps in developing high performance Business Intelligence solution and helps building high capacity data warehouse.

Microsoft has done complete ground up work to make SSIS as a complete platform for high speed data transformation solutions.