Posted by pinney.colton@gmail.com on 04/01/07 02:41

I have a SQL 2005 database that's created by a survey data collection
system. Users of this system are fairly non-technical and have little
to no conscious control over the datatypes. As a result, the data is
mostly stored quite inefficiently as varchars. For example, there is
data that could be stored in a column of bits and it's stored as a
varchar value of 0 or 1. (Yuck, I know.)

I am building a reporting system using this raw data and have a new
table structure designed that is much more efficient (and better for
reporting). Does anyone have any suggestions for getting this data
into my new structure? Specifically, how would you recommend checking
that varchar field and determining it could be stored as a bit?

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