May 2006 Blog Posts
According to Donald Farmer who visited Slovenia a few months ago importing flat files
with SQL Server Integration Services is the fastest way today to do that.
SSIS now has a special very fast and very optimised library that transforms flat file text
into appropriate SQL Servers datatypes.
On very large files the speed gain is in the range of 7-20% of other ways.
More MSDN info here.
Now how do you get to that cute little option? here you go:
1. Run Visual Studio 2005
2. Under Business Inteligence Project create new Integration Services Project
3. Go to DataFlow tab
4. From Data flow Sources in the toolbox...
We're all familiar with four constant columns that should be in every table.
Those are: CreatedOn, CreatedBy, LastUpdatedOn, LastUpdatedBy or any other names you have for them. :))
But you get my point. Recently i'm leaning into a direction that there should be 2 more columns
added to those four. Those are CreatedOnTZOffset and LastUpdatedOnTZOffset where TZOffset stands Time Zone Offset.
Some may ask why do we need this? Well let's say you have an app that is accesed
from all over the world and you're not just displying data to users. They can
also add and update stuff. Time Zone information...
This is a good explanation on how to acctually bill a customer for your service over a credit card in your web application.
More here.
This is an interesting thing to know. It seems that automatic update of statistics doesn't work for small tables (up to 500 rows) on SQL server 2000.
More here.
in xp_sprintf up to 50 arguments can be specified. sometimes there's a need for more.
This is it and it could as easily be rewritten as a function.
create proc spSPrintF
@body varchar(8000) = '',
@params varchar(1000) = '',
@paramSeparator varchar(10) = ','
as
begin
if @params = ''
begin
select @body
return
end
-- so we don't have to specially handle the last item
...