I’m currently creating a web application to be the front end to an accounting program/database for my company. I’ve been told to use SSIS so I’ve been dabbling in BIDS and it looks promising.
Since I only have read-access to some of the tables on the accounting system, and they don’t want me calling the system directly; I would like to sync certain tables from the accounting database to my front-end database, nightly. This would include insertion of any new records, and updates on records already existing in the system if they’ve changed.
Does anyone know of a good walk-through/tutorial to achieve this in BIDS using SSIS? I’m guessing it would be best to use Lookups/Merges but have not found any decent tutorials quite yet.
Thanks
EDIT01:
For Example, I’m looking to sync an Employee’s View from the Accounting System to a Persons table in my system, syncing 4 columns (bold is my front-end):
- EmplCode –> PersonNumber
- LastName –> LastName
- FirstName –> FirstName
- Trade –> TradeClass
This table consists of approximately 3000 rows (and will probably never grow past 10 thousand rows), is de-normalized and has no relationships. It seems like a fairly basic table to start/learn with.
The cheap but dirty approach would be to truncate all your local tables and then perform a full refresh every time. Having no RI makes that an easy proposition. If you have scenarios you’ve set up locally, have a final task in the SSIS package modify the data as needed.
If you have any familiarity with SSIS, then read up on Andy Leondard’s ETL Instrumentation pattern. You don’t have to do all the row counting and logging, especially for something that’s fairly disposable like you’re doing. But he covers pulling the data out, identifying changes between the sets, and a sane method for writing updated rows back to the database (the out of the box OLE DB task is atrociously slow).