BI Development Studio Eases Package Development

The Business Intelligence (BI) Development Studio, a new integrated development environment based on Visual Studio 2005, gives developers a broader range of programming features than did the simple stand-alone designer used to create Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages in SQL Server 2000. New features and capabilities include support for programming constructs, such as loops and branches; support for structured, modular programming; and integrated debugging.

The illustration shows the BI Development Studio’s Control Flow design surface, which developers use to define the structure of Integration Services packages—the sets of instructions and configuration details that are interpreted by Integration Services’ run-time engine.

Packages are modular structures that are made up of the following major components:

Tasks encapsulate the units of work in an Integration Services package. This might include, for example, operations such as moving or copying files, or sending SQL Server commands to a database.