Before the data can be loaded into the data warehouse, it must first be transformed into an integrated and consistent format. A transformation is a sequence of procedural operations that is applied to the information in a data source before it can be stored in the specified destination. Data Transformation Services (DTS) is a new facility in Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 that supports many types of transformations, such as simple column mappings, calculation of new values from one or more source fields, decomposition of a single field into multiple destination columns, and so on.