DTS Introduction
Many organizations need to centralize data to improve corporate decision-making. However, their data may be stored in a variety of formats and in different locations. Data Transformation Services (DTS) addresses this vital business need by providing a set of tools that lets you extract, transform, and consolidate data from disparate sources into single or multiple destinations supported by DTS connectivity. By using DTS tools to graphically build DTS packages or by programming a package with the DTS object model, you can create custom data movement solutions tailored to the specialized business needs of your organization.
DTS Basics
Data Transformation Services (DTS) provides a set of tools that lets you extract, transform, and consolidate data from disparate sources into single or multiple destinations. You create a DTS solution as one or more packages. Each package may contain an organized set of tasks that define work to be performed, transformations on data and objects, workflow constraints that define task execution, and connections to data sources and destinations. DTS packages also provide services, such as logging package execution details, controlling transactions, and handling global variables.
DTS supplies a number of tasks that are part of the DTS object model that can be accessed graphically, through DTS Designer, or programmatically. These tasks, which can be configured individually, cover a wide variety of data copying, data transformation, and notification situations. For example:
Importing and exporting data
DTS can import data from a text file or an OLE DB data source (for example, a Microsoft Access 2000 database) into SQL Server. Alternatively, data can be exported from SQL Server to an OLE DB data destination (for example, a Microsoft Excel 2000 spreadsheet). DTS also allows high-speed data loading from text files into SQL Server tables.
Transforming data
DTS Designer includes a Transform Data task that allows you to select data from a data source connection, map the columns of data to a set of transformations, and send the transformed data to a destination connection. DTS Designer also includes a Data Driven Query task that allows you to map data to parameterized queries.
Copying database objects
With DTS, you can transfer indexes, views, logins, stored procedures, triggers, rules, defaults, constraints, and user-defined data types in addition to the data. In addition, you can generate the scripts to copy the database objects.
Sending and receiving messages to and from other users and packages
DTS includes a Send Mail task that allows you to send an e-mail if a package step succeeds or fails. DTS also includes an Execute Package task that allows one package to run another as a package step, and a Message Queue task that allows you to use Message Queuing to send and receive messages between packages.
Executing a set of Transact-SQL statements or Microsoft ActiveX scripts against a data source
The Execute SQL and ActiveX Script tasks allow you to write your own SQL statements and scripting code and execute them as a step in a package workflow.
