What is the perfect method to deal with Dat files?

[prabha_friend]

What is the perfect method to import data from Dat files with having more a than million rows.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

what do you want to do with them?

how many rows do you need to import?

 

[boblarson]

So, this is going to be a bit of a pain for you. The reason is that this file cannot be imported in any of the usual ways. The ONLY way is going to be very, very, very SLOW. I'm talking about importing ONE line at a time by means of using the old standby method of Open FileNameHere For Input As #1 and then iterating through the records.

 

[boblarson]

I just thought of something else. If you have SQL Server available you could possibly use SQL Server Integrated Services (SSIS) to do the work, which would probably be faster. I don't know what the IO limits are for one of the workflow steps that would do the import but it might be possible.

 

[DCrake]

How does the structure appear? How easy is it to distinguish when 1 record finished and another one starts? How many lines make up 1 record? Cany post a sample?