The best bet is to load the data into a staging table which has the date field defined as a text string. You can then load into the staging table using the native value, then insert into your production table casting the value to a datetime data type. You can use a CASE statement to convert the value that SAP is giving you into NULL.

Denny

Just yesterday I came across a problem which I hope you can help me with.

I have searched the web for “null value in text field”, “null”, etc.
There are pages and pages of search results and I’ve been reading some of the links that look promising but so far have not found anything useful.

Can you please help? I think the solution is probably pretty simple but I just don’t know sql well enough.

Below is a description of what I’m trying to do:

I’m trying to load a text file using a DTS package into a SQL 2000 database table. The text file contains information from our SAP backend system.
All the text file fields have a fixed length, and the fields are delimited with the vertical bar ‘|’.

1 of the fields in the sql db table is defined as a datetime with length 8.
This table date field allows null.

This is my question:

If my date field in the text file is blank or unknown, how can I move a null value into the date field so that DTS can process the field into the sql database table correctly?

Things I have already tried:

00/00/0000 in the date field - - > this does not work.

blank in the date field - - > this does not work.

09/09/9999 in the date field - - > this works but now the front end shows this fake date.

getting rid of the spaces between the vertical bars if there is no date value
such as this - - > || < - - this works but I don’t know how to move the vertical bars if the field is blank.