Stuart McLachlan
stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Sat Mar 24 15:10:46 CDT 2012
There is ne sotrage advantage to shrinking th varchaf() but you will gaind space by making the single character fields to char(1). On 24 Mar 2012 at 9:07, jwcolby wrote: > Thanks for the offer Stuart. > > It turns out that the file was comma delimited CSV with the first line being field defs. I just > imported the file using SQl Server's import wizard. Then it turns out that the table definition > file didn't even remotely match the actual fields in the data file. *CUTE*! If I had spent a bunch > of time on pre-processing I'd have been annoyed. > > The SQL Server import widget is happily importing the file as we speak. 179 million records so far > after about 18 hours of importing. > > At this point my biggest problem is that the first line in the file, the field def line, also had > quotes around them (comma delimited) and for some reason the wizard removes the quotes in the data > but not the field names. Thus I have a table with leading and trailing quotes in every field name > which I will have to figure out how to strip out. IIRC I cannot rename fields in SQL Server if > there is very much data in the table, and there is just a bit of data in this table - 182 gigs so far. > > I do have one question. The import wizard uses varchar(50) as the default field size. I had to > modify one field (the email field) to longer than that, however many of these fields are just a > single character. Is there metadata which SQL Server stores to tell me what the longest actual data > in each field is? And if so, is there any advantage to "shrinking" the field size from varchar(50) > to char(1) for the hundreds of single character "code" fields or the other fields where the actual > data is varchar but shorter - 15 characters or 40 characters? > > John W. Colby > Colby Consulting > > Reality is what refuses to go away > when you do not believe in it > > On 3/23/2012 4:54 PM, Stuart McLachlan wrote: > > I'd just use a text editor with decent regexp find/replace (Crimson Editor?) to convert the list > > into a Create Table SQL query. It should only take a couple of minutes. > > > > Heck, if you want to send me the definition file, I will do a first pass on it for you. > > > > _______________________________________________ > dba-SQLServer mailing list > dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver > http://www.databaseadvisors.com > >