Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 18: Getting Integrated with Integration Services
550
Most of the time you’ll stick with whatever the default conversion was, based on the source data type,
but sometimes you may want to change the output type in some way, for example, treating integer data
as a string to deal with some expectation of the end destination of your data. (Not all systems treat what
is seemingly the same data the same way.)
Finally, you can mess with the nullability and scale/precision of your data. It’s pretty rare that you would
want to do this, and it’s something of an advanced concept, but suffice to say that if you were to use more
advanced transformations (instead of the default Import/Export Wizard), then this might be an interesting
option to facilitate error trapping of data that isn’t going to successfully go into your destination
system. In most cases, however, you would want to do that with WHERE clauses in your original query.
Now, let’s click Cancel to go back to our Configure Flat File dialog, and then click Next to move onto the
next dialog.
At this point, you’ll get a simple confirmation dialog. It will synopsize all the things that you’ve asked
the wizard to do — in this case:
❑ Copy rows from [Query] to C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\My Documents\
TestExport.txt.
❑ The new target table will be created.
❑ The package will be saved to the package file C:\Documents and Settings\xxxx\
My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\Integration Services Project1\
Integration Services Project1\Package1.dtsx.
❑ The package will not be run immediately.
Most of this is self-explanatory, but I want to stress a couple of things.
First, it will create the file for us with the name specified; if, when we designed the package, the file had
been detected as already existing, then we would have been given some options on whether to overwrite
the existing file or just append our data onto the end of it.
Perhaps more importantly, notice that a package is being created for you. This package is what amounts
to an SSIS program. You can have SSIS execute that package over and over again (including scheduling
it), and it will perform the defined export for you each time.
Finally, note that it says that your package will not be run immediately; you need either to execute this
package manually or schedule it to run.
Click Next, and your package is created.
Let me stress again that this is just something of a preparation step; your package has not run, and your
data is not yet exported. You still need to execute or schedule the package to get your actual exported
file. That side of things — the execution of the package — is the same for all SSIS packages though, and
isn’t Import/Export Wizard-specific, so we’ll hold that side of things until the next section.