Let us continue our question of the day series with day twenty-two.

What are all these abbreviations:  SSIS, SSMS, SSAS, SSRS, and SSMA?

I had this question the other day from a colleague who is a Windows administrator who was thoroughly confused by the alphabet soup.  Thus I will break it down for you.  Most of you know SSMS is the SQL Server Management Studio, the graphical interface for managing SQL Server.  SSMA is Microsoft’s SQL Server Migration Assistant, which is available for download, for various migrating OTHER databases to SQL Server such as Oracle.  That leaves us with the Business Intelligence arena for SQL Server:  SSIS, SSAS and SSRS.  SSAS is the SQL Server Analysis Services which provides data mining and OLAP (online analytical processing) functionality for the BI arena.  SSIS is the SQL Server Integration Services which provides data integration solutions and ties all of the BI pieces together.  SSRS is the SQL Server Reporting Services package allowing full reporting capabilities.

Enjoy!