This book is a treasury for ETL developers / architects. It is very different from other ETL books in the way that it is written with a top-to-bottom approach instead of focusing on details of an ETL tool. Each chapter presents a problem that an ETL developer/architect will face during a real project. Then it provides design ideas and best practices for the problem and finally delivers a solution that can be implemented. The collection of design ideas, best practices and solutions provided is priceless. The solutions are ready for use or require minimal change and presented in enough details for someone who is familiar with SSIS. This is the book you want to have if you want to know how the SSIS experts would solve the ETL problems you are facing.

The only chapter that falls short in comparison with others in terms of the quality of the solution provided is chapter 9 on SSAS processing. The information is useful and written with the same format of other chapters but is not as comprehensive and of the same caliber. Considering that the focus of this book is on SSIS and not SSAS, this chapter is a good starting point for SSAS processing.

One highlight of this book is that many of the design patterns and frameworks presented in this book are independent of the version of SQL Server and will be useful in future versions. There are many references to other useful books when the reader needs to gain a deeper background knowledge. This is a great book to keep and come back to.

Overall this book is written well, easy to understand, and chapters flow smoothly together. Once I started reading this book, it was hard to put it down.