Hi dwilliscp,

When data is read from some flat file sources, SSIS treats it as unicode data. The data flow will not implicitly convert unicode to non-unicode data types, so you need to perform this conversion yourself. One way is to use the Data Conversion tranformation. Another way is to use a Derived Column transformation. In both cases, a new column is added to the data flow task's pipeline with the desired data type (you cannot change the data type of a column using either of these tasks). If you use the Derived Column transformation, you need to perform a type cast operation on the unicode column to create a new non-unicode column. If your input column is named MyCol, the type cast will read something like (DT_STR, 255, 1252)[MyCol]. DT_STR is the type cast that yields an SSIS data type compatible with the SQL Server varchar data type. The 255 is the length of the string, and 1252 represents the US-EN code page.

Hope this helps,

Andy