[dba-SQLServer] dba-SQLServer Digest, Vol 48, Issue 12

JWColby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Fri Feb 16 08:19:40 CST 2007


>It sounds like you're helping the scum of the earth--spammers
(snailspammers are spammers too).  But I'll help you anyway and hope you
find better work.

LOL.  Everyone has a perspective.  My perspective is that there are
multi-billion dollar companies that specialize in selling mailing lists.  I
don't control it, my turning down this job would be spitting in the wind to
the industry but a ton of money lost to me.  

The thing to understand is that my client BUYS these lists.  They do not
commission the surveys.  I have no control whatsoever over the survey,
content, method, field names, data type, multiple choice.  No control.  Not
even over whether my client buys the list.  No control.

My client buys a list and sends it to me.  It contains name / address / and
a bunch of fields, ALWAYS text when it gets to me, which may represent any
data type known to man.  It is almost always a fixed width file with
trailing spaces.  Once in a blue moon, it is comma delimited with field
headers.  Usually it has another file which contains what the field names
are, often what the answers can be, never what the data type is.

What I need is not rocket science.  I could do it in one day's programming
if it were in Access with VBA and DAO available as tools.  Unfortunately,
due to the size of the lists (millions of records, often tens of millions)
doing it in Access is a non-starter.  And I am a nubee at SQL Server.

And I apologize if I annoy you, but I thought this list was for learning.
It does appear though that nobody here knows how to approach this problem so
I will drop it.

Thanks for your time and understanding.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Greg
Worthey
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2007 7:12 AM
To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com
Subject: Re: [dba-SQLServer] dba-SQLServer Digest, Vol 48, Issue 12

Ok, all this echoing of the same post over and over is annoying!

John,
It sounds like you're helping the scum of the earth--spammers (snailspammers
are spammers too).  But I'll help you anyway and hope you find better work.

You just need to generalize your surveys:
SurveyDef:
	SurveyDefID int
	Question varchar(50)
	QuestionType varchar(10)   (multiple choice, fill-in, choose one,
etc)

SurveyAnswers:
	SurveyDefID int
	SpamTargetID int
	Answer2 varchar(10) 

And then for the "count order", you just have rows in another table
specifying the data needed to build the query.  You only need a few tables
in total.

Greg Worthey
Worthey Solutions
www.worthey.com


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