[ARCHIVED] Importing course_dim flat file into MSSQL - issues with syllabus_body

[mbailie]

I'm having an issue with the course_dim flat file and importing the flat file into MSSQL (SQL Server 2014). It seems that some of the courses have extremely long syllabus_body columns. I'm using the SSMS wizard for importing files (and the import flat file) that work with all the other files so far. But I can't get course_dim to import. Has anyone else had this issue? Is there a way to download this data without the syllabus_body column?

Thanks!

[a1222252]

Hi Mason,

We use an Oracle database and the syllabus_body field requires a CLOB datatype because some records contain more than 4,000 characters. There are other tables with long fields too. I believe the equivalent datatype in SQL Server is VARCHAR(MAX).

Regards,

Stuart.

[mbailie · Accepted solution]

Well, sadly it was all user error (or maybe this is a good thing?). I'll post the solution to it just in case someone else runs into this problem. Sql Server Management Studio's Import Flat File wizard doesn't give very good error messages. I had assumed that my Data Type nvarchar(max) just wasn't enough for whatever reason and I kept getting a truncation error. Well I decided to test out if it was another column and put nvarchar(MAX) for all my char columns and it imported the data. So one of the columns wasn't being allocated enough space. I will go through and figure out which one it was later, but I thought I'd respond as soon as I figured it out here.

Thanks!