This came up at a webcast a couple of weeks back and I couldn't find this anywhere. Jim, our King of Migration/Upgrades/Pipeline components, is about to start blogging any minute now, and will have a lot more information on these. In the meantime, I had to get a high level version done for WWPC, so here's the detailed version as well.

There's always harm in making comparisons between DTS and SSIS for folks that don't understand the magnitude of changes because this might imply a trivial renaming of features and tweaks to others... well, in the interest of helping those more familiar with the products make the mapping, here's a take on how folks did things in DTS and how to do the same in SSIS:

Design Time Debugging

DTS: Messageboxes in ActiveX scripts.

SSIS: MessageBoxes in Script tasks (); Breakpoints in script task code thanks to VSA; visualizers in data flow; Better error messages; Error Flows

Location independent package initialization

DTS: Dynamic Properties + ActiveX scripts.

SSIS: Configurations + Property Expressions.

Loops

DTS: ActiveX scripts.

SSIS: Built in Loop construct including predefined helper enumerations for looping over files, tables, roles, etc.

Restartability

DTS: ActiveX scripts

SSIS: Control flow checkpoints support built into the product. Data Flow can be simulated by breaking data flow into separate control flow tasks that provide checkpoint functionality by writing state out to raw files, SQL tables, etc.

Deployment

DTS: Tips on SQLDTS.com

SSIS: Deployment wizard; support in dtutil.exe for batch files.

Operational Security

DTS: Package Password, SQL Security, Agent Service Account.

SSIS: Package Password, numerous other encryption options, SQL Security, additional Roles, proxies.

Extensibility Points

DTS: Tasks, Transforms (hard)

SSIS: Tasks, Transforms, Source Adapters, Destination Adapters, Log Providers, Loop enumerators, Connection Managers.

Data Transformations and Cleansing

DTS: Limited set of transformations + ActiveX

SSIS: Extensive list of transforms, High performance data flow engine, domain independent cleansing transforms from Microsoft Research, error flows.

BI Functionality

DTS: AS/DM Tasks

SSIS: AS/DM Tasks; ability to push data directly to AS and DM without landing; Reports based on packages; Shared metadata between AS/RS/IS projects.

Any others that should be included? Anyone else done this mapping already?

regards