"pelican" wrote:

> I did try adding an identity column and let it increament like an autonumber
> in the destination file. But it did not work. When I transfered from the
> text file, I got an error message saying that the I did not supply data for
> the identiry column, which did not make sense, as SQL was supposed to do that
> for me.
>
> The order I mean is when text file was extracted, it looked like this:
>
> RecordNumber: 123456
> Title: aaaaa
> Year: bbbbb
> end of record sign
>
> RecordNumber: 234567
> Title: bbbbbbb
> Year: ccccccc
>
> End of record sign
>
> ......
>
> This goes on for about a thousand times which I means I have a thousand
> records. The order is very important. I would like to read into the SQL the
> order the text file list records, and use End of record sign to start a new
> record. When the order of the line is or the same as the text file, the wrong
> year will be listed for the wrong record, and so is the title. This happened
> when I transferfed the text file.
>
> I just don't get it why SQL will not tranfer according to the order the text
> file lists records.
>
> Any idea?
> Thanks.
>
>
> "Allan Mitchell" wrote:
>
> > How are you determining that they are not in order?
> >
> > As far as I know a text file is read top to bottom and left to right. When you retrieve the rows however if you want them in a
> > particular order then you must use an ORDER BY clause.
> >
> > Is there anything on which you can ORDER?
> >
> > If not you may want to add an IDENTITY column.
> >
> > --
> >
> > Allan Mitchell MCSE,MCDBA, (Microsoft SQL Server MVP)
> > www.SQLDTS.com - The site for all your DTS needs.
> > www.SQLIS.com - SQL Server 2005 Integration Services.
> > www.Konesans.com
> >
> >
> > "pelican" <pelican@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:AADB14AA-0AA2-4AF4-BA2E-E63421070AE5@microsoft.com...
> > > Hello everyone,
> > > I am using the "import" function in SQL to import a big text file to SQL.
> > > It will import all the lines, except that starting from line 989, it just to
> > > a line way down at the bottom of the text file, line 70987. Isn't it
> > > strange? I thought the import function will read from top to bottom one line
> > > after anther line. The order of lines in this text file is very important to
> > > me, as each record has 40 or 50 lines. When the order is not right, I would
> > > not know which line goes with which record. Any help will be greatly
> > > appreciated.
> >
> >