Article
10/01/2010

Integration Services Transformations

SQL Server Integration Services transformations are the components in the data flow of a package that aggregate, merge, distribute, and modify data. Transformations can also perform lookup operations and generate sample datasets. This section describes the transformations that Integration Services includes and explains how they work.

Business Intelligence Transformations

The following transformations perform business intelligence operations such as cleaning data, mining text, and running data mining prediction queries.

Transformation	Description
Slowly Changing Dimension Transformation	The transformation that configures the updating of a slowly changing dimension.
Fuzzy Grouping Transformation	The transformation that standardizes values in column data.
Fuzzy Lookup Transformation	The transformation that looks up values in a reference table using a fuzzy match.
Term Extraction Transformation	The transformation that extracts terms from text.
Term Lookup Transformation	The transformation that looks up terms in a reference table and counts terms extracted from text.
Data Mining Query Transformation	The transformation that runs data mining prediction queries.

Row Transformations

The following transformations update column values and create new columns. The transformation is applied to each row in the transformation input.

Transformation	Description
Character Map Transformation	The transformation that applies string functions to character data.
Copy Column Transformation	The transformation that adds copies of input columns to the transformation output.
Data Conversion Transformation	The transformation that converts the data type of a column to a different data type.
Derived Column Transformation	The transformation that populates columns with the results of expressions.
Export Column Transformation	The transformation that inserts data from a data flow into a file.
Import Column Transformation	The transformation that reads data from a file and adds it to a data flow.
Script Component	The transformation that uses script to extract, transform, or load data.
OLE DB Command Transformation	The transformation that runs SQL commands for each row in a data flow.

Rowset Transformations

The following transformations create new rowsets. The rowset can include aggregate and sorted values, sample rowsets, or pivoted and unpivoted rowsets.

Transformation	Description
Aggregate Transformation	The transformation that performs aggregations such as AVERAGE, SUM, and COUNT.
Sort Transformation	The transformation that sorts data.
Percentage Sampling Transformation	The transformation that creates a sample data set using a percentage to specify the sample size.
Row Sampling Transformation	The transformation that creates a sample data set by specifying the number of rows in the sample.
Pivot Transformation	The transformation that creates a less normalized version of a normalized table.
Unpivot Transformation	The transformation that creates a more normalized version of a nonnormalized table.

Split and Join Transformations

The following transformations distribute rows to different outputs, create copies of the transformation inputs, join multiple inputs into one output, and perform lookup operations.

Transformation	Description
Conditional Split Transformation	The transformation that routes data rows to different outputs.
Multicast Transformation	The transformation that distributes data sets to multiple outputs.
Union All Transformation	The transformation that merges multiple data sets.
Merge Transformation	The transformation that merges two sorted data sets.
Merge Join Transformation	The transformation that joins two data sets using a FULL, LEFT, or INNER join.
Lookup Transformation	The transformation that looks up values in a reference table using an exact match.
Cache Transform	The transformation that writes data from a connected data source in the data flow to a Cache connection manager that saves the data to a cache file. The Lookup transformation performs lookups on the data in the cache file.

Auditing Transformations

Integration Services includes the following transformations to add audit information and count rows.

Transformation	Description
Audit Transformation	The transformation that makes information about the environment available to the data flow in a package.
Row Count Transformation	The transformation that counts rows as they move through it and stores the final count in a variable.

Custom Transformations

You can also write custom transformations. For more information, see Developing a Custom Transformation Component with Synchronous Outputs and Developing a Custom Transformation Component with Asynchronous Outputs.

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