The Data Integration Service distributes rows of data based on a port or set of ports that you define as the partition key. You define a range of values for each port. The Integration Service uses the key and ranges to send rows to the appropriate partition.

For example, if you select key range partitioning, the Data Integration Service uses the key and ranges to create the WHERE clause when it selects data from the source. Therefore, you can have the Data Integration Service pass all rows that contain a specified value to one partition and all other rows to another partition.