caught off guard by some greek lettering in a warehouse feed

• stan

  Ten Centuries

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  October 1, 2025 at 1:34 pm

  #4663169

  Hi we run 2019 standard.   Our warehouse's ssis based etl is klunky but so far it does the job.

  for one of our recent acquisitions, and really for the first time we have to temporarily deal with tab delimited dimension and fact flat files in our feeds.   All our other feeds come from tables in various dbms technologies and connectors.

  in this acquisition's facility dim feed we've encountered a greek alphabet based facility name.  i'll list what i believe to be the "facts" that perhaps the community can use to help in the dilemma this creates for me...

  1.  both the target stage and wh column for facility name are varchar, not nvarchar
  2.  for a variety of reasons, i dont think we can afford the risk right now of changing the latter 2 to nvarchar
  3.  when i open their dim facility file in notepad, i see utf-8 in the bottom right which i asked them not to do but as far as i know that has less to do with encoding and more to do with an extra byte on the front of the file that isnt considered of much use anymore anyway in the industry
  4.  by default when i added this and some other files of theirs to ssis, 1252 ansi was  chosen by ssis
  5.  we can probably talk them into using the/an English alphabet alternative for now in setting a value in this 1 of 12 facilities

  6.   when i look at the value in notepad and stage, i see what you would expect, a combo of lozenges, I's and other letters with a symbol (oomlatt?) above them, lire symbols etc etc.

  one of the things i am wondering is if i can somehow capture this value in a unicode format, whether there is a translation function that could be called from ssis/sql to translate the value (maybe transliterated) into english.   This is an important field in our dashboards.  When i think about the executives that would look at our dashboards, i dont think any of them would understand greek and want to be in a position of distinguishing this acquisition's greek names from those of future acquisitions.

  Another thought i'm having right now is using their "province" name for that facility in facility name also.   It uses english letters.

  • This topic was modified 9 hours, 30 minutes ago by stan.