Importing From Excel To Sql Server 2005

I have about 50 Excel files from which I have to import data with some transformations to Sql Server. My first approach was to use Excel Source component in a data flow to read the data . However, as it turned out column X in some files was being converted to a DT_NTEXT blob and in other files it was mapped to WSTR. The reason I guess is because column X contained string of varying sizes - some greater than 255 characters while others less than 255 ( max was 3000 ) . My package used a ForEach loop to iterate over all the Excel files in a directory and feed that to the data flow task. I played around with IMEX and TypeGuessRows setting but they didnt help me . In my second approach I used 2 Excel sources ; one set up for the blob type and the other for the string type . I joined them together using a precedence contraint. This worked but I then figured out that there were 2 other columns in my data that exhibited the same behavior. I couldnt continue with the mulitple Excel source approach cause I would then have 8 Excel source components. Finally, I played around with Execute SQL Task . I selected the columns X,Y and Z , initialized 3 variables of type Object , used a ForEach to enumerate over the dataset and feed that to a script component that converted the objects to Strings. This seems to work for all types of data in the mulitple columns.



My question - has anyone encountered such problem ? What was the solution ? Just thought I would share this with the rest of the community. I cant seem to recall what the exact error I was getting ..but it was something like "cant convert long data to string " or something . I also keep getting annoying error icons in my Excel Source components used in the foreach loop. Something to do with acquire connection failed even after I set DelayValidation to "true".





Thanks