SQL database file Microsoft says that SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) “is a platform for building high performance data integration solutions, including extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) packages for data warehousing.” A simpler way to think of SSIS is that it s the solution for automating SQL Server. SSIS provides a way to build packages made up of tasks that can move data around from place to place and alter it on the way. There are visual designers (hosted within Business Intelligence Development Studio) to help you build these packages as well as an API for programming SSIS objects from other applications.