Bytes and Bites of Internet
Archive for October, 2012
Database Snapshots … The Good, Bad and Ugly
Oct 28th
In SQL Server 2005 MSFT introduced very new feature … Database Snapshots … which is basically a read-only view of database at the time when snapshot was taken. Just as a side note…even at the time this feature was introduced in SQL Server, other age old DBMSes like Oracle and DB2 were already offering similar feature in their systems. Database Snapshots can prove really useful if used wisely or can bite you back if used without any thoughts … hence … The Good, bad and ugly … 
Another note before starting … unfortunately Database Snapshots are kind of toys for rich only 
… which means you have to have Enterprise edition to use this feature. But since I have developer edition … I am more like a lottery winner 
… because all Enterprise features are available in Developer edition … with that being said … let’s prepare staging environment.
I have a test database with few sample tables that I have derived from AdventureWorks tables. I created this database into a temp HDD created using one of my favorite RamDisk software. Which gives me ability to blow up that drive without any issue at any time (which exactly what I will do at the end of this demo in the Ugly part ). But say if you don’t have enough RAM you can use USB thumb drive as a place to restore database backup. I restore database with following command …
Importing Fixed Width file into database using SSIS package
Oct 13th
Ok, few weeks back I posted how to create a fixed width file using SSIS for test purposes. Then after that I posted TSQL way to import it into database, and now today I am going to show how to import it using SSIS package… I have used same database (which I used to generate file) and same file (generated using SSIS package) for this demo because … well because I can 
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First step is to fire up VS 2010 with SSDT and create new SSIS project. And then select data flow task and drag it to control flow tab. Open up data flow task and select “flat file source” as source of data and drag it to data flow task work area. This will open up connection wizard which you will use to configure flat file source.
For those who don’t know what flat files are … they are just a txt or csv files. They could also be fixed position files. All of them uses some kind of row and column delimiter to separate data within them