SSIS · DataBaselines

SSIS stands for SQL Server Integration Services

As taken from the Microsoft web-page for this product:

Microsoft Integration Services is a platform for building enterprise-level data integration and data transformations solutions. You use Integration Services to solve complex business problems by copying or downloading files, sending e-mail messages in response to events, updating data warehouses, cleaning and mining data, and managing SQL Server objects and data. The packages can work alone or in concert with other packages to address complex business needs. Integration Services can extract and transform data from a wide variety of sources such as XML data files, flat files, and relational data sources, and then load the data into one or more destinations.

Integration Services includes a rich set of built-in tasks and transformations; tools for constructing packages; and the Integration Services service for running and managing packages. You can use the graphical Integration Services tools to create solutions without writing a single line of code; or you can program the extensive Integration Services object model to create packages programmatically and code custom tasks and other package objects.

This article continues an exploration of the Census Trade data sets, but with an eye for doing larger “bulk-loading” of data the Census makes available. Specifically, we will: Retrieve export data from the US Census by using their Application Programming Interface (API), Import the API-generated data file into a database using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services. In a previous article, I described a method of generating export data using the Census USA Trade Online website. That method is great for initial discovery and extraction of one-time data. But if you are ingesting Census data on a recurring schedule - you need a process you can repeat easily and consistently. The Census API is useful for this purpose.