How to compare database differences?

Working with databases is often a tedious task. When deploying a new database, or deploy changes within the database to production, you want to be sure that the schema is right. Not only the changes to the schema are important, but also the contents of views and stored procedures need to be compared.

However, it is hard to compare databases and schemas on the same server, or between servers. Additionally, it is a time consuming and often recurring task.

Therefore we added the 'Compare database' functionality to the SQL DataTool. We made it as easy as possible to use, and saves time. This article covers how to compare databases using the SQL DataTool.

Solution for full transaction log

In this article, I discuss the solution for the error mentioning that the transaction log for your SQL database is full due to 'ACTIVE_TRANSACTION'. This error means that you SQL Server database has the wrong settings for the task that you want to perform.

Most likely, you are trying to bulk import a large data set from a plain text file or Excel file. Or your program or database executes an infrequent task or processes very large transactions, causing the database to throw these errors. In this article, we will explain how you can prevent the transaction log error in SQL Server while bulk importing your data.

How to import decimals in SQL Server database tables?

I know what you are going through. I have experienced it. You receive some files from clients to show them your data analytics skills. Since you can not use the database of the client, or you cannot use the production environment databases for performing analytics. Now you have to transfer the data between environments or databases. You want to start with the interesting work as soon as possible, and show the results to the client. However, while importing the files, errors are popping up.

In this article I will show you how you can use SQL DataTool to get around the errors caused by all kind of issues while importing files containing decimals. You will learn how to configure SQL DataTool so you will not experience the frustration caused by the decimal issues. In the second part of this article, you will learn how to get the erroneous records into your database.

Import World Cities Database

When you are working in data analysis or data science, it will not take a long time before you want to enrich your data with other sources. You can get data from all kinds of sources, like systems in your company, but also from external sources from the internet.

In this article, you will learn how to add the location data of cities to your database. Since a lot of visualization tooling, like Microsoft PowerBI, or Tableau, uses the latitude and altitude data, it is useful to add this to your data. However, most systems within companies do not store that kind of data. In this article, we explain how you can easily use the SQL DataTool to import data from the World cities database to your SQL Server database.

Column length conversion issues

The import data wizard of SQL Server Management Studio is a useful import tool for SQL server databases. But when you get errors while importing data, you will experience the limitations of this functionality. Data conversion errors are one of the most common and time consuming frustrations of data processing. And one of the hardest to find a solution to. In our day-to-day work, we lost a lot of time to solve this kind of errors. Therefore we developed the SQL DataTool.

In this article we will show how the SQL DataTool can help you with data load errors related to string conversion issues due to text lengths and data model problems. When using the import data wizard, the data conversion errors caused by column length are hard to solve. The first part of this article, we will give an example. In the second part of this article, we will show you how the SQL DataTool can help you with this data conversion error.

Wrong column delimiter

Column delimiters in plain text files can cause annoying problems. Solving such a problem will take you a lot of time. And this is time that you rather spend on doing some real work, or basically anything else that you like to spend your time on.

In this blog post, I will explain which root causes there are for the column delimiter issue. At the last part of this article, I will also offer you the solution. This solution involves using the SQL DataTool.

In a different article, I went through giving the solution of unexpected line breaks in flat files. This might also interest you when you run into the issue of a wrong column delimiter.

SQL database import errors: line breaks

When importing huge plain text files or comma separated files, different errors may occur while using the SQL Server import wizard. One of such errors is line breaks in the source files.

SQL Server import and export wizard expects a line break before a new record begins. However, when importing plain text that contains (larger) text columns, you might walk into a record that contains an unexpected line break in the text column. The larger the number of records to be imported, the bigger the chance that a record causes an error.

Import date with SQL Server Management Studio

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has the option to import data to a database. This functionality is part of the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard. Using this wizard, importing and exporting data becomes very easy. However, the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard needs clean and perfect import files. Importing dates into SQL Server databases might cause some headaches, therefore I will also offer a solution using the SQL DataTool to import dates into SQL databases.

In this blogpost, I will first show how to use the wizard, and which errors you might see while importing date fields. After that, the SQL DataTool is described and how it will help you importing files that cause errors when importing date fields using the SQL Import wizard.