Posted by Scott Marquardt on 09/25/05 18:04

Stu opined thusly on Sep 24:
> Scott,
>
> Have you considered an ActiveX script in a DTS package to shred the
> data periodically (you can use the SQL Scheduler to run it once a
> minute). We do this to parse out syslog tables; it's kludgy, but its
> consistent. While not as immediate as a trigger to populate a table,
> it does keep you from modifying the vendor database (which, if your
> vendor has the ability to update their database, could be a big
> benefit).
>
> Obviously, your users would have to be trained on how to enter data
> consistently, and you'd probably want some sort of validation to pick
> up on coded entries that don't meant your
> data-followed-by-a-comma-followed-by-more-data rules. You may even
> look at Regular Expressions inside your DTS package to help with that.
>
> Just thinking aloud,
> Stu

Less intrusive, yeah. I'll be needing to roll my own shredder, though --
unless you'd care to name some good controls. Haven't tried any, ever,
really. It's been nice to have never needed to!

I anticipate we'll see now more than 3000 such records a year, so this is
probably something that could be done at runtime. Users won't be running
anything that queries a result of this, so parsing it all out when running
reports (not sure where to implement that, yet, but it won't be in the
application itself) is an inelegant but tenable option.

--

Scott

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