title: Why would I use an SSIS package in SQL Server 2008 as opposed to some other technology?
body: <p>I'm in a QA department of an internal development group. Our production database programmers have been building an SSIS package to create a load file from various database bits for import into a third-party application (we are testing integration with this).</p>
  
  <p>Once built, it was quickly discovered that it had dependencies on the version of SQL Server and Visual Studio that it was created with, and had quite of few dependencies on the production environment as well (this is not an SSIS problem, just describing the nature of our setup).</p>
  
  <p>Getting this built took several days of solid effort, and then would not run under our QA environment.</p>
  
  <p>After asking that team for the SQL queries that their package was running (it works fine in the production environment), I wrote a python script that performed the same task without any dependencies. It took me a little over two hours (note that I already had a custom library for handling our database interaction), and I was able to write out a UTF-16LE file that I needed.</p>
  
  <p>Now, our production database programmers are not SSIS experts, but they use it a fair bit in their workflows -- I would readily call all of them competent in their positions.</p>
  
  <p>Thus, my question -- given the time it appears to take and the dependencies on the versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio, what advantage or benefits does an SSIS package bring that I may not see with my python code? Or a shell script, or Ruby or code-flavor-of-the-moment?</p>