Earlier in the week anxious crowds gathered outside our imposing building, straining for that portentous plume of white smoke. Sure enough, a weary German (Matthias, for it is he), emerged from the genteel conclave that is SQL Server Shiproom (see http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1787462,00.asp ) to announce to the city and the world, Habemus CTP. The new CTP (or IDW the XIVth as it is known to the faithful) has it's work cut out. On the one hand it has to be conservative and not break the applications of our traditional supporters, while including enough new fixes to address pressing issues. I think it succeeds admirably and I really do recommend that MSDN subscribers and Beta users upgrade to this build.
The April CTP got a bunch of publicity including a nice press release. I was a little miffed last week with our friends in marketing because I felt the excellent Forrester note on SQL Server Integration Services was not getting enough exposure from them. Of course, I understand that they have their work cut out on the big box server, especially the CTP announcement, but there is so much goodness in what we are achieving that I can't help wanting more. Other companies do a lot more of this. Oracle Warehouse Builder publicizes the fact that screenshots of the product are included in Ralph Kimball's ETL course (along with SSIS naturally, although Oracle inexplicably fail to mention that.) Informatica peppers my news tickers with press releases. I fully expect to open my mailbox one morning to read the headline PowerCenter commits transaction.
However, I have no doubt that one day the penny will drop and the significance of what we have achieved in SSIS will be clear. So this week it is great to see the Forrester report highlighted on the front page of our SQL Server site. Thanks guys! http://www.microsoft.com/sql/default.mspx
Now that we are moving nearer to RTM I get a lot of questions about SQL Server editions, and how SQL Server Integration Services is factored in different editions. Actually, most of the questions are about why we are factored as we are. As a Program Manager I guess I can't duck these questions, as I always say in presentations: If you want to know how, ask a developer. If you want to know why, ask a PM. And if you want to know when, ask marketing.
So what are our editions of SQL Server Integration Services, and why?
SQL Server Express is the entry-level edition of SQL Server, and SSIS does not surface in that edition at all. If you look at the listing of the various editions you will see that it does include Import / Export, but this is a simple utility, not a version of SSIS. Really, SSIS is simply too powerful to give away. The Import Export utility will meet most needs of those who currently use Express. Even those who used DTS in MSDE mostly only used it for Import and Export - it was less common to see it in use as a transformation engine. In the new .NET world these users may even find leveraging the .NET framework and ADO.NET a more efficient developer story for embedding lightweight data transfer and manipulation than working with an application API. However, for those who really need to do more, there is always the next step up ...
SQL Server Workgroup Edition is a somewhat beefier edition, pitched between Express and Standard. It includes the Import / Export wizard which leverages SSIS to build simple source-destination packages, without any transformation logic. The packages can be saved and scheduled, so it is a useful tool. You can get some insight into our current thinking if you consider that the wizard is actually named the SQL Server Import Export wizard, not the SSIS wizard. The idea here is to start to distinguish between the use of SSIS in utilities and the use of SSIS as an enterprise-class data integration application. The sheer usability of SSIS enables us to build these simple wizards - try doing that in Data Stage! - while retaining the power of a fully featured integration platform. In the future, I suspect we may see SSIS itself diverge into more differentiated architectures, like an SSIS Express. But don't quote me on it, I'm just woolgathering.
What can I say about SQL Server Standard Edition? It's only 2005 and already this may the bargain of the century. The Business Intelligence applications here are really fantastic value for money. You get the full SSIS in here, with the exception of a few high-end components. But there is no throttling of performance at all, and you do get some excellent features such as aggregation in the data flow and the Slowly Changing Dimension Wizard. Originally the SCD wizard was destined for Enterprise Edition only, but we heard from consultants and customers that this wizard was such a good learning tool for building dimension loads, that we should really enable those new to data warehousing to get their hands on it. And so here it is.
At one time we had thought about restricting this edition to only one source and one destination (no Unions, Merges, or Multicasts) but that was soon shot down. Parallelism and the ability to handle conditional flows were such great features for SSIS that we could not bear to keep them from standard users. We also pulled the Data Mining and OLAP tasks back into this sku, following a flurry of anxious mails, after another posting suggesting they might only be in Enterprise edition. However, the transforms which enable data mining in the data flow, one of our most exciting features if you ask me, are still only available in ...
Enterprise Edition. The big Daddy of them all. You get the lot. Data mining integration, fuzzy data cleansing, text mining ... Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I consider the feature set we are bringing to market.
Whatever edition you choose, I know you're going to have fun with this. And when you have fun, you'll spread the word, as our community is so enthusiastic and engaged. And that is marketing that IBM and Larry will really struggle to match.
PS: I do believe PowerCenter has just committed another transaction.