SSIS Server Hardware Software Configuration

In February 2008, Microsoft announced a record-breaking data load using Microsoft® SQL Server® Integration Services (SSIS): 1 TB of data in less than 30 minutes. That data load, using SQL Server Integration Services, was 30% faster than the previous best time using a commercial ETL tool.

To illustrate the ability of SSIS to meet such performance needs, Microsoft and Unisys arranged to load over 1 terabyte (TB) of data that was read from flat files on four source servers into a SQL Server database on a single destination server. In this test, the data was read, converted from text fields to database data types, transferred over the network, and inserted into the destination database in less than 30 minutes. To be precise, 1.18 TB of flat file data was loaded in 1,794 seconds. This is equivalent to 1.00 TB in 25 minutes 20 seconds or 2.36 TB per hour.

Microsoft has published a very interesting whitepaper on the same, and the key take-away from this paper are Database Setup, Hardware Configuration, Profiling SSIS performance and some SSIS performance tuning techniques like use of FastParse property for example.