Connection Managers

Abstract

SSIS uses connection managers to encapsulate, manage, and abstract away physical data stores. Connection managers allow you to read from, and write to, nearly any data store for which you have drivers and access. You can use connection managers to pull data from flat files, databases, or Excel spreadsheets and push data to databases, custom file formats, or web sites, for instance. In this chapter, you’ll start by looking at some of the most commonly used connection managers and move on to the more advanced, and less commonly used, connection managers SSIS supports. Some of the infrequently used connection managers can be used to connect to web servers, FTP servers, and even Windows events, to name a few examples.

Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.-American designer Charles Eames