A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!   Read more...

Ever tried to open 1 Gig ASCII file with Notepad? WordPad? Do you remember ASCII codes of Tab and Carriage Return? Enter Terminator; huge ASCII file viewer and BCP helper. Terminator reads top 10 (and more if asked) records of ASCII file of any size. It detects record terminators and calculates current cursor position (field offset) and length of selected area (field length). Best of all, it's free!  Read more...

In this article, Brian Knight shows you the different ways to load data in DTS and how to optimize the Data Pump task for data loads. He also examines performance numbers on other data loading tasks in DTS.   Read more...