Friday, January 28, 2005

New Endeavors

Today marks a new beginning for me. After 2 1/2 years with Compassion International as Enterprise Data Architect, I'm returning full-time to the role of independent consultant / author / trainer. I'm excited about developing courses, working on several projects at a quick pace, and I enjoy teaching SQL Server. So the move makes sense. I'm also thrilled to be working alongside the other MVPs with Connected Innovation. Between Yukon, Connected Innovation, developing the new SQL Server Optimization course, and writing SQL Server 2005 Bible, the rest of this year is going to be a whirlwind.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Bulk Insert and Hex Codes

I've been working with an airline to redesign their reservation data mart. All has been going well until tonight's data extract from their reservation vendor - all of the bulk insert sprocs failed. The error pointed to data length problem, so my first thought was that the data format had changed without warning. It turns out that the row termination character had changed and bulk insert wasn't seeing the end of the last column. But the new terminator wasn't obvious. In notepad, the text data looked normal. After Googling to find a good hex editor (it's been a while since I got to use a hex editor for data detective work),and downloading XVI32 hex editor, I discovered that the new row terminator was hex 0x0A. Setting bulk insert's terminator value to the hex value worked wonderfully.