i was hoping for a less interactive/intensive way to arrive at a statement of what exactly the problem we are trying to solve is, but you are right, i guess...

not so good...there are business analysts interposed between the report requestor and developers, so developers rarely speak to the end user.

My feeling is that GSquared's suggestion hits the nail on...

GSquared (5/23/2012)

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My standard for documentation, in the code (comments) or in the project (ticketing system discussion thread), is that you have to document WHY some piece of code is the...

How do you unambiguoulsy define your requirements, with language or diagrams?

Are your DBAS masters of your business' business rules?

the split function in inbuilt from MasterDataServices

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633810.aspx

the insticles look like this

/****** Object: UserDefinedFunction [mdq].[Split] Script Date: 04/24/2012 17:58:04 ******/

ALTER FUNCTION [mdq].[Split](@input [nvarchar](4000), @separators [nvarchar](10),...

i think i must have asked the wrong question...what i had envisoned was the contents being split on the delimiter down the rows...what i am getting is the entire field...

Wow!

thanks a ton

drew

gonna try that...should be less tedious

thanks very much

drew

Light bulb just went off....

did you mean do it in the connection manager?

its still manual, but in the connection manager its dragging lines to define the columns instead of typing...

Unix dumps the output all into one line, so i get a bazillion records with no CRLF.

We use a split function (either in MKS toolkit or in powershell) to...

i am importing from Unix into SQL Server...the data dictionary is in Excel

Holy Good Night!

That was spectacular.

I see i had about a 20% appreciation for the task at hand.

This fills the bill for us too.

Thank you immensely for your generosity

drew

That's what we;re trying to accomplish too, get the definitions off paper in into the data.

Its true that collecting the data in extended properties keeps the data with the...

i was just trying to exercise an example.

sorry it didn't make it.

back to work <g>

thanks

thanks very much, i appreciate the reminder.

would you mind please commenting on the idea that without a uniqueness check, surrogate keys promote duplicates to uniqueness? maybe that wasnt phrased in...