Designing Packages in Business Intelligence Development Studio

This section describes the tasks that you typically perform when creating Integration Services packages in SSIS Designer.

SSIS Designer is a graphical tool for creating packages. It is available from Integration Services projects in Business Intelligence Development Studio.

SSIS Designer includes separate design surfaces for building a control flow, data flows, and event handlers in packages. The designer also provides access to the dialog boxes, windows, and wizards that you use to add functionality and advanced features to packages and to troubleshoot packages. For example, from SSIS Designer you can access the Configure SSIS Logs dialog box for implementing logging, the Variables window for adding and configuring variables, and the Set Breakpoints dialog box for setting breakpoints. For more information about the windows, dialog boxes, and wizards that SSIS Designer provides, see SSIS Designer.

A package is created within the context of an Integration Services project. Before you can use SSIS Designer, you need to open an existing Integration Services project or create a new project. When you create a new Integration Services project in Business Intelligence Development Studio, a new package is automatically added to the project. To open SSIS Designer, you double-click a package in the SSIS Packages folder in an Integration Services project. For more information, see Integration Services Projects.

SSIS Designer has no dependency on the Integration Services service, the service that manages and monitors packages, and it is not required that the service be running to create or modify packages in SSIS Designer. However, if you stop the service while SSIS Designer is open, you can no longer open the dialog boxes that SSIS Designer provides and you may receive the error message "RPC server is unavailable." To reset SSIS Designer and continue working with the package, you must close the designer, exit Business Intelligence Development Studio, and then reopen Business Intelligence Development Studio, the Integration Services project, and the package.

In This Section

• Creating an Integration Services Project
  Describes how to create a new project that will serve as a container for Integration Services packages at design time.

• Creating a Package in Business Intelligence Development Studio
  Describes how to create a new package by using a template or by copying an existing package.

• Creating a Package by Running a Wizard
  Describes the wizards that you can use to create a new package that contains the connection managers, data sources, and data destinations that you need.

• Setting Package Properties
  Describes how to set the various properties that are associated with a package.

• Creating Package Control Flow
  Describes how to create a control flow in a package using the Control Flow tab in SSIS Designer.

• Creating Package Data Flow
  Describes how to create a data flow in a package using the Data Flow tab in SSIS Designer.

• Creating Package Event Handlers
  Describes how to create an event handler in a package using the Event Handlers tab in SSIS Designer.

• Creating Connection Managers
  Describes how to add and configure the connection managers that packages use to connect to data sources at run time.

• Using Data Sources in Packages
  Describes how to use data source objects in packages.

• Using Data Source Views in Packages
  Describes how to use data source view objects in packages.

• Reusing Package Objects
  Describes how you can copy packages, data sources, and data source views and copy the objects that packages contain.

• Using Annotations in Packages
  Describes how to use annotations to make packages self-documenting.

• Viewing Package Objects
  Describes how to view a hierarchical representation of all the elements in a package in the Package Explorer tab of SSIS Designer.

• Debugging Packages
  Describes features in Integration Services for troubleshooting packages, such as setting breakpoints and using data viewers to display data at run time, and describes the debug environment in Business Intelligence Development Studio.

• Saving Packages
  Describes how to save packages to the file system and save copies of packages to either the file system or the msdb database in SQL Server.

• Deleting Packages
  Describes how to delete packages from Business Intelligence Development Studio.

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See Also

Tasks

Importing and Exporting Data by Using the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard

Concepts

Integration Services Packages

Designing and Implementing Packages (Integration Services)