It's not a generalization if your suppliers have given you a data dictionary. Many of our data suppliers do the same. The files they give us are always formatted with these fixed field lengths in mind, which we must then TRIM before using properly. The only difference in our packages is we handle erroneous row lengths in the package.

Very interesting way of importing flat files. We also build specific packages for each of our files coming in from different suppliers, and it's a real pain. SSIS can handle a lot of different scenarios, but IMO it's not a simple enough process, as you have mentioned.

Good article. ... Need to think about the pros and cons of adopting it here. Thanks for sharing!