Chapter 57. Expressions in SQL Server Integration Services
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is Microsoft’s enterprise extract, transform, and load (ETL) platform, and is used in large-scale business intelligence projects and small-scale import/export jobs around the world. Although SSIS contains an impressive set of features for solving a range of data-centric problems, one feature—expressions—stands out as the most important for SSIS developers to master.
Expressions in SSIS are a mechanism to add dynamic functionality to SSIS packages; they are the primary tool that SSIS developers can use to build packages to solve complex real-world problems. This chapter examines SSIS expressions from the perspective of providing elegant solutions to common problems and presents a set of tested techniques that will allow you to take your SSIS packages to the next level.
Before we can dive into the deep end with expressions, we need to look at SSIS packages—the context in which expressions are used. Packages in SSIS are the units of development and deployment; they’re what you build and execute, and have a few common components, including
