MarkItUp

SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) is the successor to DTS and is a powerful, enterprise tool for managing ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) operations.  Using SSIS you can easily design ETL packages and then import them into Integration Services within SQL Server.  From there you would typically run them via Scheduled Jobs.

Here's a link to a nice series of tutorials that walk you through how to develop SSIS packages - although be prepared to do a lot of reading as it's all text:

Link to SQL 2005 SSIS How-To Article Series | developer.* Blogs

Here is another resource which, among other things, contains heaps of articles about how to use specific tasks within an SSIS package:

http://www.sqlis.com/

Yesterday Greg Lowblogged about the new DBPro edition of VSTS.  This is a set of product lifecycle tools that will allow you to work with databases.  From Greg's own blog, here is a listing of some of its features:

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals includes a number of great new features:

A new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of our choice.

Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change

A New T-SQL Editor allows you to be more productive when writing T-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel execution of queries and viewing of execution plans.

SchemaCompare allows you to quickly compare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and a database) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync

DataCompare allows you to quickly compare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databases into sync

The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to create database unit tests using T-SQL or managed code.

DataGenerator lets you create data generation plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based upon your existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior to running unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

UPDATE[1]: Next time I need to read the "friendly" manual before saying that something isn't working.  Everything is now working as expected!

UPDATE: I downloaded the LINQ preview and installed it.  It actually installed real quick with no reported errors.  The LINQ-Preview templates didn't show up so I went and copied them into my default templates folder.  I opened up VS and copied some LINQ code into the a code file, pressed compile and received an error stating that: "System.Array does not contain a definition for WHERE".  Sorry LINQ... you promised so much. 

I've posted this question to the LINQ forum so hopefully there will be a response soon: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=90075

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114680

In this video Anders shows how to use LINQ and also explains some of the implementation that make it possible at a language and CLR-level such as: Extension Methods (lambda-like functions) and Anonymous Types.   I'll be interested to have a play with the samples to get a better understanding of how I'd implement some of this stuff. 

The possibilites behind Extension Methods seem very exciting to me and they are a very powerful concept. 

Having just written a filesystem data provider (for SUB) I know what's involved in working with data outside of the database.  Stop and think about where we get data from these days - WinFS, XML, etc - and you start to realize how cool it would be to have data model unification across each of these things.

I think that one obvious area that will benefit from this in the future is for writing strongly typed queries in the database using managed code but, as Dan Fernandez points out in the video, being able to run LINQ over any enumerable data means that the power of database queries can now be brought to a whole range of things such as querying the registry keys or other interesting things such as querying controls on a User Interface... think about that for a while!

Also, the other day, Joseph talked about his first impressions of XLinq which sounds as though it is an XML-specific flavour of LINQ:

    http://jcooney.net/archive/2005/09/13/6731.aspx

I was sitting next to Greg at the course today and asked him a question about MSMQ which, of course, let to a digression into Service Broker.  Before I knew it I had my laptop cracked open and we were pouring over the syntax for the new "SOA'ish" language. 

Service Broker allows you to define "contracts", "services", "schemas", etc and use them for asynchronous message relaying.

A nice intro article is:

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sqlsvcbroker.asp

One of the frustrating things about Service Broker is that it didn't get its own UI in the SQL Server Management Studio.  This means that you would need to query the views whcih run over the top of the system tables that store the Service Broker object definitions.  Greg did however point me to a blog entry written by a guy who is creating a GUI admin tool for Service Broker objects:

    http://staff.develop.com/nielsb/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0f036cd1-2692-4362-837a-81cb2587acc2