Importing data into DB

Question

Hello Please would you advise? I have a pile of txt files in this format. 111010 ####User: xxx 111010 ####Computer: yyy 111010 Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX 10.2.152.26 111010 McAfee Agent 4.5.0.1810 .... The number of lines depends on the amount of installed soft. And these reports are generated weekly. DB should look like: USER;COMP;SOFT;VERSION xxx;yyy;McAfee Agent4.5.0.1810 ...;....;....;.... After that I will be building ASP application over it. I was thinking to use powershell to somehow format it into csv and then import it. Do you have any better idea how to manage it? Or how to design the DB? Some free tool maybe? How to manage the weekly import into DB etc.. server is 2008R2. All ideas will be really appreciated. Many thanks!

Sam Hobbs · Answer

You did not provide all the details about the format of the input data; in particular it is not clear to me how to determine what is the software name and what is the version. I assume that you could search the data backwards to get the last space character and then that would be the end of the software title and the beginning of the version. If you are going to write a program to reformat the data then you could write a program that writes the data into the database. There are many articles in this web site to help with that. If you do create an output file that is then imported into the daatabase then I suggest using a tab-delimited file; it will be a little bit easier. You can use the system scheduler to schedule the program to execute weekly.