What you should know before watching this course

- Now, it may be beneficial before you do this course to have an understanding of basic SQL. And there's a lot of courses with lynda.com's online library that will help to achieve that. Now I say may because perhaps this course could be a starting point for your journey to understand SQL. If that's the path you're going down, then take a notepad and as you go through each of the videos, write down those concepts that you don't understand so you can go back to lynda.com, look at what you wanna learn and what you didn't understand, and just do a search for it so you can enhance that knowledge.

That's probably an excellent way to go. Another thing you want to consider before you do this course is to get a better understanding of what we're trying to do when we centralize data from many sources. An example would be such as if you have a family budget or a company budget or something like that. You might wanna take a look at it, look at where those numbers come from, especially if they come from different people, different sources, databases, off the web, et cetera.

Then understand if you need this report to be updated on a regular basis, weekly, daily, monthly, whatever, that you need a process to go out, attach to the different data sources, bring them in, transform it, and put it into this common, underlying database that you can use to generate the report. Understanding a very basic thing, such as a family budget, will allow you to understand where you gain different information from and how it has to be uniformly applied.

With that knowledge, you can proceed through this course and then you will have an oversight of what professionals use within Integration Services to do exactly what you just did.