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 _______________________________________________ dba-SQLServer mailing list dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver http://www.databaseadvisors.com