Hey David,

Point taken - and I agree it is a good thing to...

@jeff: good point about the view! A good option - I do dislike editing format files!

@Barry, Mark: That's cool, and always good to see good examples of code for...

Yep, you're welcome Ian.

I'm going to wait for the final instalment before really getting into this, but the whole idea seems highly dubious at this stage.

Paul

Well, I can't find anything to say that a bcp operation reads the rows in order from the source file and inserts them into the destination table in the same...

I believe row order is guaranteed using any of the available bulk import mechanisms (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188728(SQL.90).aspx). I will try to find something authoritative to back that up.

One solution would...

Lynn,

Ok - no worries. It seems I did misunderstand you!

Do please run the script I posted when Real World commitments allow - I remember being quite surprised when I...

And there was I trying to be all gentle and non-controversial about the MAV thing.

Way to go Jeff! It was like reading my own thoughts - just more eloquent...

UMG,

We covered the bulk import idea about eleventy gazillion posts back - IIRC we were splitting the text of Moby Dick into words. The basic technique was to export...

Lynn,

I am wounded - you seem to suggest that I did not verify it...!

Lynn Pettis (5/10/2009)

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You can use...

RBarryYoung (5/10/2009)

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Unfortunately it's only is his book, I have never seen it on the web. Further, the example in the book is incomplete (non-working) so I had to finish...

RBarryYoung (5/10/2009)

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Actually my point was that you don't have to convert the produced string TO XML in the first place. It really is just a string concatenater & formatter...

GilaMonster (5/10/2009)

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Itzik Ben-Gan mentioned it during his precon at PASS last year. He also mentioned that the other T-SQL trick often used (select @var = @var +col from tbl) was...

Florian Reischl (5/10/2009)

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Confirmed, FOR XML PATH('') is a hack which doe not create a valid XML. Just notice this is a build-in feature. XML PATH is by definition a simpler...

GilaMonster (5/10/2009)

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RBarryYoung (5/9/2009)

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Moreover, I am now completely convinced that the empty string feature is no accidental side-effect, cleverly exploited by Microsoft's customers, but rather intentional functionality explicitly added...