What does this technology do?

SQL Server is comprised of multiple components that we will briefly review.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

SSIS is generally thought of as a tool for extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tasks associated with Business Intelligence (BI) or other reporting applications. Indeed, the classic use of SSIS is for bulk data transfers and large batch data maintenance jobs typically found in the BI world. Most developers consider it "just" an ETL tool.

In fact, SSIS is an extremely powerful tool that you should consider for use in any situation that requires you to move data from one point to another or integrate data across multiple platforms, in or out of the Microsoft stack. SSIS is easily extended with managed code and scales easily to handle everything from a few rows of data to very large data transfers. In addition to data transfers, SSIS can also handle the most common database maintenance tasks with objects available out of the box, and less common...