Unisys and Microsoft have dispelled the perception that for high performance ETL, the only alternative is a UNIX-based solution. With SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, Microsoft and Unisys deliver an optimized ETL solution that will support even the most demanding enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives. They conducted a series of real ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load) tests with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS, formerly known as DTS). Performance tests compared throughput, scalability and performance on both 32- and 64-bit processor configurations on a Unisys ES7000. SSIS demonstrated parallelism and the ability to utilize all available CPUs in multiple aggregation, parallel lookup and transformation testing.

The testing extracted, transformed and loaded more than 1.2 billion sales and marketing order line items into a data warehouse in less than an hour. It processed one billion lookups over a dimension table with 100 million rows in just over 24 minutes, or about 683,000 lookups/second. Integration Services on a 16-processor Unisys ES7000 processed 16 parallel transformation workloads amounting to 14.84 GB of raw data in 8 minutes, a rate of 1.86 GB/minute.

The test results documented in this paper prove that Microsoft SSIS running on an ES7000 server can take advantage of parallelism and multiple processors to deliver the extremely high rates of transformation throughput. Through collaborative benchmark testing and engineering, Unisys and Microsoft mitigate implementation risk by validating optimal performance and establishing best practices in system sizing and configuration to achieve high performance levels.

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