RSS feed integration
I (and others on my team, notably Donald Farmer) tend to do a demo showing data from RSS feeds being processed in the SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) data flow pipeline. I have been asked by quite a few people to post a sample package showing how to incorporate RSS data.
Turns out that it is quite easy to include data from a RSS feed. Try the following:
1. Start a new SSIS project
2. Add a Data Flow Task
3. Switch to the Data Flow tab by double clicking the Data Flow task
4. Add a XML Source to the data flow
5. Double click the XML Source to edit it
6. In the XML Source Editor, in the “Connection Manager” portion, make sure that the “XML File Location” is selected in the Data access mode. In the XML location text box, type in the url for a RSS feed (e.g., http://news.com.com/2547-1_3-0-5.xml)
7. Click the “Generate XSD...” button, give the XSD file a name and save it. Make sure that it is correctly reflected in the XSD location text box.
8. Click “Columns” in the list on the left hand side. If all goes well you should see the available columns from various outputs from the RSS feed.
9. Select “item” from the Output Name dropdown box.
10. Click “OK” to close the XML Source Editor.
Now you are ready to consume the RSS data.
The simplest way to do this is to add a destination component (e.g., OLEDB destination to your SQL Server, for which you need to create a new OLDEDB connection in the connection tray) and connect the XML Source to the destination.
Right click on the connecting arrow and add a Grid Data Viewer. Now run the package and you should be able to see data from the RSS feed as it gets loaded into your destination.
Hope this helps.
An interesting scenario to try with data from RSS feeds is to use the Text Mining component to filter out news items that may be of interest to you. Donald's blog has some tips on using Text Mining. Other possible data integration scenarios might include updating customers information with relevant and current news, to help with a sales call.