I was wondering if anyone within the group has had experience working with the IATA SSIM file. We are going to have to populate a SQL Database with schedule information and I am trying to decide if SSIS or BizTalk is the best option. Cheers Ryan

I'm interested in this as well as we'll be going down this path shortly.Jeff Wharton MSysDev (C.Sturt), MDbDsgnMgt (C.Sturt) MCT, MCPD, MCITP, MCDBA, MCSD, MCAD

SSIS vs BizTalk. Regardless of your Industry Vertical, can you tell us a little of the business requirements for this type of operation? In my experience, SSIS is good if you have a regularly scheduled load of large volume, such as 100,000 or 100,000,000 rows to load into a Data Warehouse every night. BizTalk is good if you have information that needs to be coordinated across systems, small bits of information, but sent around in near real-time. Those may be gross generalizations, but they're decent. What are your business requirements for this file type?Todd C - MSCTS SQL Server 2005 - Please mark posts as answered where appropriate.

Hi Ryan, I agree to Jeff and todd's points. I would like to join this team to execute this operation. Please share your requirements. I would suggest SSIS is the best ETL Tool for data population.Thanks Ayyappan Thangaraj UG Lead, Puducherry, http://SQLServerRider.blogspot.com

I do not have all the requirements yet. It is my understanding that the data is updated on a monthly basis. We will get a SSIM file uploaded via FTP or in some cases we will need to connect to an FTP site and download the file. I have yet to find something that documents the schema of a SSIM or any information on the number of records within the file

One word solidifys this answer: MONTHLY. That means SSIS hands down. Biztalk is good for what it does, but really not geared around large volumnes on a monthly basis. Now that we've answered this question, start a new thread when you have better requirements, or come up against a particular issue you need help solving. You can't really expect these expert forum contributors to know about EVERY TYPE of file load there is. Good luck.Todd C - MSCTS SQL Server 2005 - Please mark posts as answered where appropriate.