I presented an “SSIS 101” session to one of our local user groups yesterday, the Carolina IT Professionals Group (http://www.carolinait.org/). It was an interesting presentation to do, as the audience is fairly broad, covering networking professionals, application developers, and hardware people. Out of the roughly 100 people in attendence, only seven had actually used SSIS, and there were two or three more that had used DTS. Over the past few years, most of my presentations have been done to audiences that are familiar with data warehousing, so it was a little different to present to a group that wasn’t ETL centric.
However, it was a good experience. The audience asked a lot of good questions. A number of people followed up after the presentation to say that they hadn’t been familiar with SSIS prior to the presentation, but now that they had seen it, they see a lot of use for it in automating some data movement tasks. One person told me that he currently spent one to two hours every morning babysitting a set of cursor based stored procedures that moved data from one server to another, and now he was going to automate the process with SSIS.
I’ve recently done a series of presentations around SSIS that focused on more advanced topics, and on some product development that Mariner (my employer) is doing around SSIS. I’ve been acting as a product manager on that, and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s given me the opportunity to apply a lot of the experiences I have had with SSIS toward creating something that will help companies manage their SSIS implementions over time. I promise not to turn this blog into a running advertisement, but as we get closer to launch I will include some links to the product information, as I’d love to get feedback from the community on it.