Re: Making the most, or over-thinking it - SQL for uploads

Typically the PC data I process is comma or tab separated values, or Excel spreadsheets.

To convert to bar delimited data:
1) In the Windows Region and Language control panel, in the Additional Settings, I change the "List separator" to the bar character.
2) I open the data file in Excel. During this step I set all column types to Text, to avoid Excel misinterpreting and changing data.
3) Perform a Save As to a new file, selecting comma separated values file type. Because the Windows "List separator" is set to the bar character, this step will actually produce bar delimited instead (at least on Windows 7 / Office 2013).

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: John Yeung [mailto:gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2016 4:20 PM
To: Rational Developer for IBM i / Websphere Development Studio Client for System i & iSeries <wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Making the most, or over-thinking it - SQL for uploads

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 3:05 PM, Jones, Mike <mike.jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

1) I convert the PC data to bar delimited, since a bar character is rarely found inside data.

Good plan. How do you go about doing that? (I'm asking both out of curiosity and "for the archives". Of course there are many good
options.)

If the data format is inconsistent, no matter how you slice it, you have to deal with the inconsistency. I prefer to deal with data quality issues up on the host, instead of during the transfer to the host, because I've created a large library of host based SQL transformation functions.

I'm sure it works well for you and a great many midrangers. I imagine some folks find it easier to deal with the quality issues before the upload, either because their skills and comfort level are more geared toward building such tools on their client platform, or because they have third-party tools written for their client platform.

John Y.