A good manager will serve his/her department well by fostering this within their group. By actually giving their developers/DBA's the time and not just suggesting it, but actually setting it...

I am going to have to go with GSquared here. You really would be served well by investigating SSIS and using the for while functions to load the data.

Not knowing what the files look like, I need to assume a bit. Of course, that means we are all in trouble.

Are the files in folders or embedded into...

sqlauthority has a good example

http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2008/04/18/sql-server-generate-foreign-key-scripts-for-database/

How about installing SSMS?

You can call it via command line also. Here is the info:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162810.aspx

First, 32 bit or 64 bit drivers?

Second, 32 bit or 64 bit sql server?

You need to make sure you can run this on the Informix Server

dbaccesss sysmaster coledbp.sql

The query method...

You need to get with your records retention person and set a retention schedule. Then write SPs that can be used to purge that data in setable segments. ...

You probably first need to look at the query plans for your view. Write indexing that might help the sql for the view process faster.

The overhead of building...

Can we see the code for the loop of folders? I think you might be not handling the folder names correctly as you map through the process.

You should have...

Do they know VBscripting? You probably have to schedule or pay for training if they don't. What is their background?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280445.aspx

Show them simple packages using the GUI in BIDS. It is a nice start.

You might want to look at a couple things:

1. What type of driver is it? Sometimes the driver will not show up because you are looking in one class...

Can't you just count off a field that will be in every record, like this:

Select count(account_id),

... blah blah blah ...

group by ... everything else in select list ...

We use to use LANDesk ServiceDesk, but if you couldn't keep the web spider running, finding calls were impossible. (Yes, it crawled the database with a web spider/index engine)...