SSIS Sort Alphanumeric?

  • Hello,

    I'm pretty new to SSIS, but I have an Excel source that I need to bring into an SQL Server table daily. There is a column I need to preserve which is an ID field with both numeric and alphanumeric characters. If I bring them in as-is, the alphanumeric values turn to NULL and the record, for my purposes is essentially lost. (I have no control over the Excel file by the way) I did set up an SSIS package that includes a sort, but while it sorts the numeric records properly, it leaves the alphanumeric records at the bottom and when it comes over into my table, they're NULL again. Anyone face this before and find a solution?

    thank you!

     

  • Yeah, Excel files can be a lot of fun/pain, because an Excel sheet is essentially a bunch of Variant type cells. That makes mapping them into "normal" sql data types difficult and error-prone.

    Avoid Excel as input source whenever you can.

  • The standard trick is to import the header row as if it were data and then discard it in the data flow (use a Conditional Split to do this).

    Also add IMEX =1 to your Excel connection string (treat mixed datatypes as text).

    But the much better solution (as already mentioned) is to import from a text file.

     

    If you haven't even tried to resolve your issue, please don't expect the hard-working volunteers here to waste their time providing links to answers which you could easily have found yourself.

  • thanks a ton guys!

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