Brad: Thank you for the demonstration of the REPLACENULL function. I am familiar with the COALESCE function in SSMS queries, so I am mildly surprise that MSFT didn't bring that function name over to SSIS / SSDT. Perhaps that function name was spoken for, or could not be re-used. Please comment.
@@BeardedDevData Since you mentioned Visual Basic: there is a difference between Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications, right? Maybe I should just look it up. The naming similarity is confusing, of course.
In one scenario from source data there were NULLs and "NULL" text values written in source data so I used expression group_type == "NULL" ? NULL(DT_WSTR,50) : group_type to get all rows to real NULLs, is there better way to do this?
That will work fine, I believe there are some 3rd party tools that can help but I would have done the same as you. The best option is to remove the problem at source if possible.
Brad: Thank you for the demonstration of the REPLACENULL function. I am familiar with the COALESCE function in SSMS queries, so I am mildly surprise that MSFT didn't bring that function name over to SSIS / SSDT. Perhaps that function name was spoken for, or could not be re-used. Please comment.
It's different code in SSIS, more based on Visual Basic I believe than SQL.
@@BeardedDevData Since you mentioned Visual Basic: there is a difference between Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications, right? Maybe I should just look it up. The naming similarity is confusing, of course.
In one scenario from source data there were NULLs and "NULL" text values written in source data so I used expression group_type == "NULL" ? NULL(DT_WSTR,50) : group_type to get all rows to real NULLs, is there better way to do this?
That will work fine, I believe there are some 3rd party tools that can help but I would have done the same as you. The best option is to remove the problem at source if possible.