SSIS Architecture

SSIS is a component of SQL Server 2005/2008 and is successor of DTS (Data Transformation Services) which had been in SQL Server 7.0/2000. Though from end-user perspective DTS and SSIS looks similar to each to some extent, it is not the case in actual. SSIS has been completely written from the scratch (it’s a new enterprise ETL product altogether) and hence it overcomes the several limitations of DTS. Though the list of differences between DTS and SSIS is quite large but one thing to note here is that the internal architecture of SSIS is completely different from DTS. It has segregated the Data Flow Engine from the Control Flow Engine or SSIS Runtime Engine, designed to achieve high degree of parallelism and hence improves the performance several folds (see the architecture image below).