Kirk Haselden

New name shame...

Sean McCown doesn't like our new name. He said so in his blog.

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I wasn't involved in the process to arrive at the new name, so I can't give an informative answer to the claims Sean makes. But I do know that we spent an enormous amount of time, effort, frustration and money arriving at and changing the name. Maybe this begs the question “What's in a name?“. I happen to believe, for various and sundry reasons that names are extremely important. After all, that's what the whole post was about. Having the right name, goes a long ways toward describing what a product does. In code, you can have a name like n or a name like nFileCount. The latter is more acceptable and desirable because it accurately self documents the variable. Likewise, Integration Services is about more than just transforming data. In our industry, “data integration” is increasingly important. The name Integration Services implies that there's more to the product than simple data transformation. It implies pulling data from various heterogeneous sources and this is important, source types. We don't live in a strictly database world anymore. Data is stored in so many different formats that it's important to be able to “integrate“ those different sources as well as transform them.

Also, those who were involved say that we _DID_ in fact ask our customers. We did solicit feedback. And the feedback we got from the people we asked was. “Change the name!“. People wanted to move away from the DTS name because they felt that the product had moved beyond DTS.

Viscerally, and perhaps from an insider's point of view, it's nice to be one of the guys. In our group there's SSRS, SQL Server Reporting Services and SSAS, SQL Server Analysis Services. Now comes SSIS, SQL Server Integration Services. (And of course SSMS, SQL Server Management Studio and SSDS, SQL Server Database Server) That should say something to our customers and to us internally that we're moving towards being a better integrated set of tools.

Personally, I like the new name. I took me a while to get used to it. But, I think it better represents what our product is all about.

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