Import data - problems

[Thorsten Hohage]

Hi,

On 2009-08-25, at 15:05, Greg Olson-Hyde wrote:

> On 25/08/2009, at 7:38 PM, Ruslan Zasukhin wrote:
>
>> Better avoid such transformations of types in DB..
>> Just from paranoid point of view :-)
>
> Are you just paranoid, or speaking from experience?
>
> What could the problems be? I will only be importing once.
>
> I have no experience with RegEx and have enough new stuff to learn at
> the moment!!!!! It would need to get the quotes from "n", "nn", "nnn",
> "nnnn" etc but not "Born in 1940" - beyond me right now.


As Bart already mentioned, if this is a serious task - and it seems  
too - then *I* would import everything in varchar fields and then use  
one / some SP(s) to move the data to the final destination. Perhaps  
this strategy is easier then to deal with a lot of regex before  
importing.

Btw. many dumps, e.g. one generated withe the _loved_ FileMaker Pro  
can have a lot of invisible chars in columns that are intentionally  
not thought to be used with such chars ->>> many trouble. All this can  
be avoided with such a two step import, too.



regards,

Thorsten Hohage
-- 

Valentina Technology Evangelist
generic objects  GmbH - Leiter Solution Center Nord