Issues while Importing data from Excel to SQL using SSIS - 2 - Alphanumeric data in a column

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. 

SSIS - Way to export all the packages from the Integration services

On several occasions, my friends or colleagues have asked me that why there is not a way to extract multiple packages @ same time from integration services. Well seriously, Why ? Microsoft whyyyyyy ?

However, as we all know for every problem there exist a solution (IMHO this is true for at least Microsoft technologies.. if solution does not work the RESTART will :) ) and mind you, that solution would be just around the corner, looking at you.. teasing you...Waiting for you to notice it (Just like girls, when they've got something new )… And when you notice it... all you (in girls case they) remember is the time you wasted to notice it. :)

So how do we export all the SSIS packages from the MSDB (or any other) folder to some location on the hard disk? Well use SSIS package to get this done… I am not kidding you? as Bizzar as it may sound but SSIS has one transformation which can be used to export the multiple packages in one go. .. Let me show you…

Issues while Importing data from Excel to SQL using SSIS - 1 - Uniqueidentifier column

There are multiple issues which one can run into while importing data from Excel to SQL server. Although SSIS has pave quite a easy way to accomplish this task but failing to paying attention to details can run us into multiple issues.

In this part we will be discuss the issue related to column from excel with Uniqueidentifier data in it. 

I have an excel file (GUIDShow) with following column structure and data in GUIDDesti sheet

Excel Data

ID - Int
UniqueId - String