This is something I had faced long long time ago...
This is what happened,I was given one excel sheet to import into database table. I created one package excel source and OLEDB destination.. Yes, I knowwwwww you geniuses, I could have done that using Import/Export wizard which also creates package. But I wanted to create package by myself … so.. created a package and ran it. Data got imported so without even querying the table I conveyed that data import is done and can be verified… To my surprise, I got an immediate reply with my senior in CC stating imported data is incorrect. In one of the column the text data was replaced by NULL during import …
Now, in order to test what went wrong during import process I had to run it all over again and geniuses you know what I have package ready with me… When verified I found out that that particular column had mixed type of values (numeric and character) so ideally excel should have treated this column of a TEXT data type. However, interestingly it did not and it treated it as a numeric column … Question is why did this happen? If we find out how does EXCEL decides on the data type of the column? We will have the solution.
This is what happened,I was given one excel sheet to import into database table. I created one package excel source and OLEDB destination.. Yes, I knowwwwww you geniuses, I could have done that using Import/Export wizard which also creates package. But I wanted to create package by myself … so.. created a package and ran it. Data got imported so without even querying the table I conveyed that data import is done and can be verified… To my surprise, I got an immediate reply with my senior in CC stating imported data is incorrect. In one of the column the text data was replaced by NULL during import …
Now, in order to test what went wrong during import process I had to run it all over again and geniuses you know what I have package ready with me… When verified I found out that that particular column had mixed type of values (numeric and character) so ideally excel should have treated this column of a TEXT data type. However, interestingly it did not and it treated it as a numeric column … Question is why did this happen? If we find out how does EXCEL decides on the data type of the column? We will have the solution.
