Hi Jim,

that's reassuring in a sense that my cautious approach was OK:)

BTW we're talking about reading from a text file rather than a table.

Even so I'm still a little mystified by this - if I did this in .NET, the sequence of reading would be consistant. My guess is that in SSIS it is read into a sequence of separate buffers and somehow it's the order of the buffers which is not sequential, but am not sure why this logically should be so.

Rgds,

Paul Ibison