Thanks everyone for reading the article, the helpful suggestions, and kind words!

Roland: I have plans (and outlines) to show loading from several sources. Excel and flat files are included. Your question about transform strategy is interesting because the answer varies from use case to use case (a fancy way of saying "it depends"). There are use cases for ELT, for example, where I use SSIS to extract the data from a source and load it to the destination, and then perform the transformations using T-SQL executed by Execute SQL Tasks. I'll cover that, either here or in an upcoming article on Data Warehouse Development (please stay tuned). Stage table creation strategy is largely driven by the client, culture, and data environment. I often employ the technique demonstrated in this article: using the New button beside the Name of the Table or View dropdown in the destination adapter. I recommend copying the Data Definition Language (DDL) statement from the Create Table window and storing it in a .sql file - something I failed to cover in the article. The .sql file can then be imported into the SSIS project (under Miscellaneous) and source-controlled right alongside the SSIS packages. At deployment time, the .sql files are executed and the packages deployed.

Samuel: There is more to come. 🙂

Mark: There is often a balance to be struck between speed and concurrency. Batch and Commit size settings for fast loads are going to vary based on many factors (another fancy way of saying "it depends"). Fast loads run much faster than non-fast-loads, but they also lock the table differently. You can use the properties to manipulate the load in a way that achieves the balance (between speed and concurrency) you seek.

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