DTS -- My learnings today

Today I wanted to schedule a data update process to be processed every month for the table I created using DTS last month.

I wanted to populate a brand new database from an exisitng database. I thought I would just schedule a package with a few SQL queries to populate the different tables in the new database. But before I proceededI wantedto find out an efficient and best way to do it.

So I posted my questions in two forums. This is what I found out from the experts:

Before you decide on setting up the DTS package there are several aspects to consider.

Do you want to recover the database from a backup when something goes wrong?
Do you want to just reload everything when something fails?
Do you want to save logging information so that you can recover the database?

Based on the answers to these questions, the best way to create a DTS package for my scenario is to create the tables with the structure and then create the DTS package using many Data Driven Query Tasks that contains the SQL statemetns of select, Insert and Update depending on whatever the case may be.

DTS is an excellent tool to schedule population of data into a database.

SQL query to get Month Name for today

I wanted to insert the month name of the current date into a table using a SQL query.

I first thought that I could achieve this by simply using the monthname function. But when I typed that in the SQL Query analyser, the error made me realise that it is not that easy to get the result I want.

So in the end here is what I came up with:


select datename(month, getdate())+'-'+ convert(varchar,year(getdate())) as Month_

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Data Transformation Services -- SQL Server

Today I used Data Transformation Services (DTS) of SQL Server 2000 to populate a table in the SQl Server database from an excel file. This was an easy way of creating a table on the fly without bothering to create the table structure first and then populate the table with the data.


Procedure I followed was as follows:

Right click on a table or a database in the SQL Server Enterprise manager.
select Import data
Select the source as an Excel driver
select the destination as the table to be created inthe database.
Click finish and your table is ready with the data populated

Yes, it is that simple.

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